THE GB Rowing Team are this week facing a battery of challenges set by the coaches and performance staff as the process to select the Rio 2016 line-ups continues – with the countdown to the Games having ticked past the six-month mark.

Richard Chambers, winner of lightweight men’s four silver in London 2012 said: “The level of racing within the squad is almost as tough as racing internationally.”

While his 2015 lightweight men’s double scull partner Will Fletcher added: “This week’s testing is some of the toughest that any of the team will ever face. It is brutal.”

Great Britain closed out the 2012 Olympic regatta with four golds, two silvers and three bronzes – a best ever. Rowing is the nation’s most continuously successful Olympic sport with a gold at every Games since 1984.

In London, 28 rowers in nine boat classes won medals and all 47 rowers made the Olympic final in front of record crowds at Eton-Dorney.

Pete Reed, the double Olympic champion and former Cirencester Deer Park pupil, recognises the internal pressure but also welcomes how well the team is bonding together.

“What I have been most pleased with so far this winter is that the team is just so close,” he said.

“We have bonded as a heavyweight men’s team, and actually as a whole team, like never before in my experience – and I’ve been through a lot of teams now.

“That makes a big difference. I think the success of previous years has got a lot to do with it. We’re doing well as a squad and that encourages us to push on and train hard.”

Fellow Gloucestershire rower and member of the gold medal-winning London four Andy Gregory said: “We all want to be on that start line under the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio.”

But the brutal honesty as four-time Olympic medallist Katherine Grainger points out is that: “Every day becomes a battle for those Olympic places and there are not enough to go round.”