Officials launch review after Australia sinks to staggering 36-year low at Paris Olympics

Rowing Australia has launched a review into the nation's worst Olympic Games in 36 years, with just the solitary bronze medal to show for their efforts in Paris. It's a far cry from the two golds and two bronze medals the Aussies won in rowing three years ago at the Tokyo Games, in what was the country's best ever medal haul at the Olympics.

Women's pair Annabelle McIntyre and Jess Morrison won Australia's solitary bronze medal at the Paris Games, with Tara Rigney coming devastatingly close to a second bronze on the final day of racing at the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium. In heartbreaking scenes for Rigney, she was mowed down by Lithuania's Viktorija Senkute in the final 100m to miss the podium by 0.53 seconds.

"At the end of the day I executed my race plan and didn't quite have those last 10 strokes in me ... my best just wasn't good enough," a tearful Rigney said after the race. Australia's crew in the women's eight also placed fourth, which was their best ever Olympic result. But the regatta ended with more disappointment as the men's eight finished last in the final.

Rowing Australia had high hopes for the men's eights after stacking the crew with three rowers who won Olympic gold in the fours event at Tokyo, three years ago. But the gamble for the blue riband event backfired badly as the Aussies finished last in the final of both the eights and the fours.

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The women's four that also claimed gold in Tokyo underwent a similar overhaul but the new-look crew languished at the back of the field in both their heat and repechage rounds. The recriminations are likely to reverberate at Rowing Australia for some time as the disappointment of the Olympics campaign fully sinks in, with performance director Paul Thompson promising they would leave "no stone unturned" to figure out exactly what went wrong and how.

Rowing Australia launches review after 36-year low at Olympics

Thompson said an external review of the high performance program had already started and it would look at the training program, the taper, selections and strategy. "We definitely need to leave no stone unturned," he said. "We're having a proper independent review."

However, the RA performance director said Australia's disappointment in the rowing had to be looked at in context. Thompson pointed to the fact Australia went into the Paris Games without a single world champion boat and faced fierce competition from several of the world's leading teams.

"What we haven't done this Olympiad is had a world champion crew coming in and punching at that level," he said. "We've had lots of good medallists and we haven't been converting at that top level so in essence, our strategy was reflected from where we finished last year at the world championships." Rowing Australia is confident the future looks bright for the Los Angeles Games in four years though, with U23 crews showing promising international results.

Rowing Australia's soul-searching comes after the men's eight crew also suffered a setback before their final, with Josh Hicks ruled out of the race with stomach bug. Hicks admitted after his withdrawal that he had to do what he thought was right for the team.

“Throughout the past three years, the past iterations of this eight, there’s been an understanding in the group – a group of probably two dozen people who have been in and out of the eight at any given time – that there will be athletes who win medals, but also a lot of people who are standing behind them; and some of those people are athletes,” Hicks said.

“Doing what’s best for the team, what’s best for a particular crew and the group at large is what’s most important. You can get upset for yourself if you don’t make a particular boat, or a circumstance keeps you out; but that would be a pretty ugly emotion and not really worth indulging in.”

with AAP