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Lisa Carrington - Source: Photosport
Canoe sprinter Lisa Carrington's support crew know she faces a daunting task to turn a world championship title into a London Games medal.
Carrington's specialist event, the super-short K1 200 metres, makes its inaugural appearance on the Olympic programme with heats and semi-finals tonight.
She also raced in the K2 500m, teaming up with Erin Taylor to qualify for the eight-strong final, finishing seventh last night.
Team coach Gordon Walker is wary of predicting how he far he thinks Carrington might get in the K1 event.
He believes things have built up nicely for her this week at the Eton Dorney regatta venue west of London, but the opposition will be formidable.
"I know she's fast, but there are a number of very fast girls out there and it will be a very tough event," he said.
"She's got to get a lot of things right."
Walker said the field would be similar to that at the world championships in Hungary in 2011, when Carrington's profile shot up in New Zealand after she took out the title.
The one big absentee then was Hungary's Natasa Douchev-Janics, who was on maternity leave and didn't defend her crown.
Douchev-Janics and Katalin Kovacs went into the K2 500m final as favourites and were looking for a third successive Olympic gold medal.
But they had to settle for silver after being upstaged by Germans Franziska Weber and Tina Dietze, who made a fast start and held on till the end.
The Polish pair of Karolina Naja and Beata Mikolajczyk took bronze.
Carrington and Taylor finished in a time of 1min 46.290sec, 4.077s behind the winners.
Walker said he was proud of how the New Zealand pair had gone, especially in their semi-final on Tuesday, when they had to contend with the three eventual medal-winning crews.
In qualifying for the final by finishing fourth, they eliminated the European silver medallists, Belarusians Volha Khudzenka and Maryna Pautaran.
"That was a very proud moment for both of them."