Britain’s world champion women’s quad scull, stroked by double Olympic silver medal-winner Katherine Grainger, felt the emerging power of China in the second round of the World Cup at Poznan, Poland yesterday.

Britain, the leaders of the World Cup to date, were forced to battle after China led by inches at 500 metres. Grainger's team held the same minimal lead at 1,000 and 1,500 metres, but China overhauled them by 0.42 sec at the finish to gain the only automatic qualifying place for the final.

"We just didn’t finish it off right," Paul Thompson, the Britain coach, said. "It's better to know now, rather than later, what China can do."

Australia and Germany were also fast in the other heat and Thompson said: "The final looks likely to be a cracking race."

Thompson’s new protégés, Annie Vernon and Anna Bebington, winners in the women’s double scull at the first World Cup event in Munich, qualified for their semi-final with a second-place finish behind Australia yesterday. However, Thompson said that he is hoping to "get a bit more out of them in the middle of the race".

There were no hiccups for Britain’s other two leading World Cup boats, the men’s coxless four and the new single sculling star, Alan Campbell. The four, unbeaten for two seasons but pushed very close by Germany and Holland at Munich, were comfortable heat winners yesterday in a reshuffled line-up after Steve Williams, the Olympic gold medal-winner, was moved from his accustomed bow seat to No 2. The Dutch were absent and New Zealand were the direct qualifiers in the other heat, well ahead of a new Germany crew but slower than Britain.

Campbell was one of four heat winners and semi-final qualifiers in the sculls, the other three being Olav Tufte, the Olympic champion from Norway, Marcel Hacker, the former world champion from Germany, and Mahe Drysdale, the world champion from New Zealand and Campbell’s training partner in London during the winter.

Campbell, who was watching his New Zealand friend for the first time in a while, said that "he has got a good bit of speed about him".

Campbell and the men’s coxless four were not the only British first place qualifiers of the day. Matt Wells and Steve Rowbotham, in the men’s doubles and the men’s lightweight four, both of whom finished a frustrating fourth in Munich, filled the top spots to reach their semi-finals. Tim Male moved from third to first in the closing stages of his lightweight singles heat.

Only one of the seventeen British crews in action yesterday is no longer in the medal hunt

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