The Great Britain men's coxless four, with the late addition of Tom Lucy after Tom James suffered a back injury this week, erased some of the pain of coming fourth in last year's World Championships in Munich with a straightforward win in their heat to qualify for tomorrow's World Cup semi-final at the same venue.

Yet while all the attention falls on the heavyweight four, few give their lightweight counterparts the glory they deserve. The Siemens-sponsored lightweight four of James Clarke, Paul Mattick, James Lindsay-Fynn and Richard Chambers won one of Britain's three gold medals at the World Championships last year, coming through the field from fifth place at the halfway stage. Yesterday they won their heat leading from start to finish.

Success has come from nowhere. “In 2005 the lightweights were on the verge of having their funding cut,” Lindsay-Fynn, a former Britain cox who gave up a career as a banker to be an oarsman, said. “Britain never won any lightweight medals and David Tanner [the GB performance director] told us we had to produce the goods or we wouldn't be funded.”

The motivation of money - and, no doubt, the signing in 2006 of Robin Williams as head coach from Cambridge University - worked. Britain's lightweights won a silver and two bronzes at last year's World Championships, as well as that gold.

Chambers said that the semi-final last year was more important than the final. “If we came in the top three in the semi we qualified for Beijing, so that put the pressure on us,” he said. “In the end, the gap between winning the final and not qualifying was just over five seconds - or two strokes.”

Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter are also medal contenders after being thrown together in the lightweight double scull for the first time last year. Purchase, who turned 22 last week, had shown his prodigious ability when winning the world title in a single scull at Eton in 2006, but the selectors felt that he would be an ideal partner in the double for Hunter, 29, who had been around for a long time without reaching an Olympic-class final.

“I've waited a long time to find someone of Zac's calibre to row with me,” Hunter said. They gelled quickly: in the three World Cups and the World Championships last year they won two silvers and two bronzes.

“We were competing against combinations who had been together for years,” Purchase said. “We just came together very quickly, in a matter of weeks. We're getting closer to the gold medal all the time.” Yesterday they won their heat by six seconds.

“It's really good that the lightweights are not in the heavyweights' shadow any more,” Hunter said, but Purchase had the final word. “They'll still think they are better, but that's only because they are bigger,” he said.