Elise Laverick and Anna Bebington do not fear the opponents that they can see. They showed that last month in the World Cup regatta in Poznan, Poland, when they led all the way down the course to record their first significant win together. It is the invisible enemy that almost stopped them going to the Olympic Games.

Fighting adversity is part and parcel of being an Olympic athlete, but the women in the Great Britain double scull have battled more than the usual aches and pains. Laverick won a bronze medal at the Athens Olympics four years ago, but her career as a rower was almost ended a few months later by a van driver who knocked her off her bicycle and failed to stop.

Laverick, 32, was left bleeding on the tarmac. Surgeons had to reconstruct her face, which had been struck full on by the van. She lost three teeth and her jaw was slashed open, but at the time she was more concerned about whether her bicycle was bent.

“It was later that the emotions really hit me,” she says. “I found myself getting distraught about things that wouldn't normally affect me, suddenly bursting into tears. And, of course, as a girl I was worried about how I looked. It was a miserable time.”

She was not even able to console herself with music - she plays the double bass and violin and studied at the Guildhall in London - because of a broken bone in one hand.

She recovered and the plastic surgeons did a magnificent job, but the accident had cost her a place in the flagship women's quad. It took two years before she started to build a useful partnership with Bebington in the double, winning bronze at last year's World Championships in Munich before fate intervened again.

Bebington, 25, spent the first part of this year laid low by a virulent form of glandular fever, but it was undetected for months because she did not want to tell her coaches how tired she felt. “I began this year feeling extremely positive, but then I started to find that after training I was whacked out for a couple of days,” the former under-23 world champion says.

“I needed to sleep the whole time, but because it was Olympic year I didn't want to look soft. I'd expected to be more knackered than ever before, but this was different. By February I had hit rock bottom and it didn't look as if I'd be picked for Beijing.”

Fortunately, the illness was discovered and Bebington was put on a recovery programme of light training. Throughout this time Laverick's support was crucial. “I spoke to Steve Redgrave about what to do and he told me that the best way of helping Anna was to get myself in the best state I could,” Laverick says. Bebington says: “Knowing that Elise was trying so hard to be there for me and that she wanted to row with me really helped.”

Bebington was not fit for the first World Cup of the season, in Munich in May, when Laverick came fifth in partnership with Sarah Winckless, but by the second World Cup, in Lucerne, Switzerland, the dream double was reunited. The only question was whether Bebington was fit enough to survive races on three successive days. Fifth place in the final was a start, but it was not until the event in Poznan three weeks later that they clicked.

“When there's only two of you it either goes or it doesn't,” Laverick says. “We have a fast start and can beat anyone over the final 750 metres. We have no illusions that China [who missed the regatta in Poznan] are the class act in our event, but there are four or five crews who could win it.”