New Zealand's triumphant double scullers have conceded they'll be too tired to party in London tonight.
Nathan Cohen and Joseph Sullivan landed New Zealand's first gold medal of the Olympic Games overnight, but unlike our bronze medal-winning equestrian eventing team, the exhausted rowers conceded celebrations may have to wait for another day.
"We're pretty tired, to be honest," Cohen told ONE News afterwards. "The one thing about winning is that you don't get a chance to warm down.
You race flat out [and] we normally do an hour warm down, so today we'll probably seize up and curl up pretty quickly - we probably won't up that late, really."
And fair enough.
The effort from Cohen and Sullivan would've had most New Zealanders screaming at their television sets, as they left it to the final metres of the race to hit the front for the first time.
"We've never been a dressage crew," said Cohen. "It's all about crossing that line first and that's all we cared about. I knew once we started coming through, it was just a matter of not slowing down, but it wasn't until the last two or three strokes that you knew it was yours for the taking.
It was a strategy the crew had employed throughout the regatta, as their relatively short statures - Cohen and Sullivan both stand at 1.84m - allow them to sprint harder than the bigger crews late in the race.
The Kiwis were last when they got to the first split at 500m and still had 2.47s to make up when they hit the 1500m mark. But they made it look easy and held steady to win by a comfortable 1.13s, while the Italian and Slovenian boats faded late in the race.
"I had no idea what was happening in the race," Sullivan told ONE News. "We were well behind, so I just went for everything we had left."
"We've raced that race over and over thousands of time, so it was just everything we had left and it came to be."
Sullivan praised the leadership of his team-mate, who gave him the nod to pull the trigger as they pushed towards New Zealand's first gold medal in the men's double sculls.
"We had a good start and we kept our composure," he said. "We just kept on doing what we'd trained for and everything came up to that last 500 metres - Nathan just made the call and went for it."
