Nhill rower Lucy Stephan will be all ears when Rowing Australia announces it athletes for the Tokyo Olympics later this month.
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The 29-year-old is a member of the women's sweep squad and if selected will compete at her second Olympics.
Stephan competed at Rio in 2016 in the Women's Eight event, after only finding out about their qualification two weeks before, when a Russian team was disqualified due to a drugs scandal.
Countries are only able to qualify boats for the Olympic Games, with final decisions on which rowers earn tickets to Toyko resting with coaches and national bodies.
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If selected, Stephan says that she will be more prepared for what to expect at the Olympics.
"There is definitely a certain comfort in knowing just even how it works and what it kinda looks like," Stephan said.
"Obviously we know that this Olympics is going to be very different but having an idea of this is, what the village was, what it was like in Rio, and the rooms and how you stayed.
"Watching racing at the Olympics in the past you do see it, there'll be world championship crews that won't even end up in the A final at the Olympics because of nerves, or for whatever reason.
"It's seeing that, making sure that you visually take that in when you're there at the event and you see the effect that it has on people and potentially what they did wrong and what's some crews did right."
With all the uncertainty that has surrounded the Tokyo Olympics and it's viability during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stephan is just happy that she lives in a country that has dealt with the virus relatively well.
"It is quite safe here," she said.
"For us to go to Tokyo we have to get a test before we go onto the plane. It has to be negative and once we land it has to be negative and then we have I think tests every two days after that.
"So for us we know it's highly, highly unlikely that we're going to land in Tokyo and (someone will) be like no sorry you can't go to the Olympics.
"Where a lot of other countries are facing that dilemma of how do we actually get our athletes over there with the certainty of them not having COVID."
Earlier this year Rowing Australia decided it would not be sending rowing teams to 2021 World Rowing Cups in Switzerland and Italy due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although this meant Australian rowers have not had the same exposure to international level competitions as they may have had previously leading into the Olympics, Stephan believes they are well prepared to challenge for medals.
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"It is hard because we do want to race and we do want to see where we are compared to the rest of the world, but we are also really lucky in the fact that we have a really, really strong squad that we can compare our times to," she said.
"We've had some like world cup simulations and we went to Nagambie for a weekend and simulated what it would be like if we were overseas.
"Then we went up to Queensland and did the same thing and we've got another one we leave for Monday next week in Adelaide.
"Because we've got such a strong squad we know that we're going fast if we can race one another which is really, really cool."
The Tokyo Olympics is set to run from July 23 to August 8.
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