The venue for this year's World Rowing Championships has a reputation for producing fast times.

The venue for this year's World Rowing Championships has a reputation for producing fast times.

It's the 29th of August 2014 at the World Rowing Championships on the famous Bosbaan course in Amsterdam.

It's not quite like it was yesterday but Grace Prendergast recalls seeing Australia's Sally Kehoe and Olympia Aldersey come flying down the course to win their semifinal in 6min 37.31sec. They set a new World Best Time which still stands.

Croatia's Martin and Valent Sinkovic were on fire in their semifinal of the Men's Double winning in 5:59.72. Another WBT which still stands.

There was a decent tailwind that day and Grace remembers there being some reseeding of lanes to reward the fastest crews from the heats with the best lanes.

Grace, preparing to race the A Final of the Women's Four with Kerri Williams, Kelsey Bevan and Kayla Pratt, could see it was going to be that kind of day.

" I remember watching and being like, 'It's clearly very fast' which obviously plants a seed for your own race," says Grace, who's back at the Bosbaan this week working in the media team for World Rowing.

"I think everyone knows the Bosbaan can be very quick on a good day but also punishing if you don't row it well. So, I think there was that sense of like, 'Oh gosh, this could be great, but it also could be very, very challenging.'

"In our experience when we were racing to go fast it sometimes doesn't work out very well because you're just thinking about a result rather than what you're actually doing in that moment, so you didn't want to focus on it too much."

They hadn't had much time in the boat anyway to get too far ahead of themselves. Grace and Kerri had just won the pair at the U23 Worlds when they got a big surprise.

"It was straight after our final or maybe the next day, we were told, 'Actually we're going to bring Kelsey and Kayla over, and you guys are going to stay over for another month or so and race world champs in the four…we thought we were getting on a plane to go home.

"It was a pretty rocky build up…I got quite sick, Kerri might have got sick, Kayla came off her bike and injured herself. There wasn't actually a lot of time we were in the boat."

But when they lined up next on that August afternoon, they were untouchable. The commentary called the possibility of a WBT at halfway.

New Zealand won in 6.14.36. WBT. Still stands, even more impressive when you consider the four at that stage was a non-Olympic event.