NAILSWORTH’S Pete Reed and partner Constantine Louloudis – fresh from his Boat Race victory with Oxford just eight days earlier – powered through the last 100m to beat 2012 Olympic bronze-medalists George Nash and Will Satch to second place at the GB Rowing Team Trials at Caversham on Sunday.

Reed was also delighted with the performance of himself and Louloudis, especially as they had just a week after the Boat Race to prepare.

“Stan did a great job for Oxford just eight days ago and I know how hard it is coming down from the Boat Race and preparing for the Trials,” added Reed.

“We’ve have help from Sean Bowden, Stan’s old coach, in the last week to catch up and I think we did a great job. I thoroughly enjoyed it, actually. That’s as well as we could have done today.

“From my experience, this is the most stressful and tense time of the whole season, even compared to the World Championships. Battling against your mates for a seat is extremely tense and the standard in the final today was higher than I have ever experienced. It was an outstanding field.”

Another Boat Race link came from Slimbridge’s Holly Hill, who competed for Cambridge in that historic women’s race before continuing her rowing development by winning the women’s pair C final with Melissa Wilson at Caversham.

“This was my first trials and a pretty big learning curve,” Hill said.

“Having just come off the back of the Boat Race we were quite tired but we put a lot of effort back into it this week to try and get it going.

“It has been an incredible year. I’ve not been rowing that long and I feel I’ve had the best first 18 months in the sport that I could possibly have had. It has just been so exciting and I feel really lucky.

“The Boat Race was just an amazing experience and then to come back and do trials was just another really exciting opportunity for me.”

Sir David Tanner, GB Rowing team performance director, said: “The attitude and discipline of our rowers this weekend has been exceptional and this will be a good base for us to form our boats for the European Championships over the next few weeks.”