It happened to Steve Redgrave, it happened to Matthew Pinsent and James Cracknell. And yesterday, at the world championships on the old Olympic rowing course in Munich, defeat came with the force of a thunderbolt to the otherwise peerless British coxless four. The challenge now for the deposed world champions, who ran up a sequence of 27 straight victories over two seasons, is to turn the bitter memory of a depressing, windswept, day into a gold medal in the heat of Beijing. The problem is that Pinsent and Redgrave will be watching from the bank.

The shock was not so much that the British were beaten by the fast-improving New Zealand. Unexpected signs of vulnerability had emerged in the last World Cup regatta in Lucerne and in the semi-finals here. But to be rowed out of the medal positions altogether was way beyond the most pessimistic forecasts. When Pinsent and Cracknell, also world champions, finished fourth in the world championships in Milan in the preOlympic year, Jurgen Grobler controversially split up the pair and formed the four that won Pinsent his fourth Olympic gold in Athens. The catalyst for Redgrave’s fifth gold in Sydney came from a humiliating defeat in a World Cup regatta in Lucerne that summer.

“I’ve no answer for you right now,” said Steve Williams, the one Olympic champion in the crew. “We’ve always been on top of the pile, so it could be that we were not all there or that we mistimed it. Over the past two years we’ve not struggled to put it together, but today nothing came out in terms of boat speed, and when that happens, it’s real poison.”

Grobler deflected the focus from the poor final performance by his heavyweights by pointing to the depth of the squad and the standard of the overall competition. No other country has five boats in heavyweight men’s finals. But the four were not alone in finishing just outside the medals. The men’s double of Matt Wells and Steve Row-botham and Alan Campbell, the single sculler, two crews expected to turn their mid-season form into medals, finished fourth.

“If you look for quantity, sometimes you lose out on quality at the top end,” said Grobler. “I don’t think it’s a disaster. I’m sure we’ll come back.”

There is plenty for the enigmatic former East German coach to ponder over the long winter. With a Pinsent or Redgrave in the crew, shortage of character or competitive will was never a factor. Watching from afar, Redgrave noticed a change in the body language of the British crew after a perilously narrow victory in the semi-final. “They didn’t ooze confidence,” he said. “They’ve been put into the position of being favourites but not firm favourites before and they have fallen short.

“The strength of this crew is as a unit. There is no Pinsent, Searle or, dare I say it, Redgrave in there. My sense is that Jurgen will try to make the four stronger rather than breaking it up. It would still be my top boat.” It will be of little consolation to the defeated British crew that they have set the standard for so long, others were bound to catch up sooner or later. “Better now than in Beijing,” said Alex Partridge. “Everyone tried to play us at our game today and they did it better than us.”

The New Zealanders were a perfect example of that. Their coach, Chris Nilsson, admitted that he had been trying to find a crew to beat Grobler for much of his coaching career. “That’s been my ambition, to beat the GB crew, and now we’ve done it,” he said. “We felt in Lucerne that we got the measure of them and we’ve proved that here.”

As the New Zealand crew docked by the medallists’ pontoon, the British four were disconsolately picking their boat out of the water in the area reserved for also-rans. Not a word was said until the crew reached the safety of the boathouse. But the inquest will not be long delayed. Not once during the 2,000m did the British crew begin to stamp their usual authority on their rivals. Marginally ahead at the 500m mark, they had slipped back into the pack by halfway and to fifth with 500m to race. The New Zealanders, in contrast, were last at halfway but established such a smooth and irresistible rhythm through the second half of the race that they still had enough in hand to resist the late charge of the Italians. The Dutch crew, routinely beaten by the British, took the bronze.

Grobler might be tempted to pair Alex Hodge and Peter Reed, his two most powerful athletes, for Beijing, although the dominance of the Australians, Drew Ginn and Duncan Free, will be hard to break.

Mixing the four with the best of the eight, an experiment that proved successful in the World Cup event in Amsterdam earlier this season, could provide another option. Ironically, the least fancied of the top crews, the pair of Matthew Langridge and Colin Smith, won the only men’s medal of the day, a bronze, while Anna Bebington and Elise Laver-ick rowed with impressive assurance to take bronze in the double sculls. Langridge, a former junior world champion in the single sculls, a fluent technician and a feisty competitor, will certainly be pressing hard for a place in the four for Beijing.

The pressure falls today on the women’s quad to defend the title they won on the disqualification of the Russian crew last year. The men’s lightweight double, Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter, the lightweight men’s four and the men’s eight will also be searching for a hint of redem-ption. “If you jump high, sometimes you have to dig deep too,” said Grobler. This will be a winter of excavation for the British four.

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