The Irish men's lightweight four of Paul Griffin, Richard Archibald, Eugene Coakley, and Cathal Moynihan have agonisingly missed out on qualifying the boat for next year's Olympics at the World Rowing Championships in Munich.
The Irish quartet finished sixth in the B final this morning; a placing of 12th overall; only the top 11 crews qualified for Beijing.
The crew will have another opportunity to qualify the boat for Beijing at the Olympic qualifying regatta in Lucerne next June.
'It's hard, it's very hard. We did our best out there; we couldn't do any more. We went out fast but not too fast; we needed to go or we'd get left. We just ran out of a bit of steam towards the end', said Killarney’s Moynihan after the race.
With only five Olympic places on offer and six crews racing the competition in this B final was going to be fierce.
The Australian four who recorded a semi-final time two seconds faster than any of the other five unsurprisingly took the lead.
The Irish four started well and were lying marginally third after the opening 500 metres.
At the halfway point America and Poland had come through to just shade Ireland and push them to fifth ahead of the Netherlands with Australia holding the lead ahead of Egypt but at this stage there was so little between all six that there was no telling who would qualify.
The Irish quartet upped their rate and despite recording the fourth fastest time over the third quarter slipped to sixth place with 500 metres to go; a mere two tenths of a second off the Americans in fifth.
Paul Griffin's crew gave it everything they had over the last quarter but were unable to catch the Americans and crossed the line in sixth place to agonisingly miss out on the final prized qualification place.
Australia, Poland, Egypt, the Netherlands, and the USA took the five qualification places in that order.
