Emily Craig is hoping her close off-water friendship with rowing partner Imogen Grant can propel the duo to new heights as they look to defend their World Championship crown.

Craig, 30, and Grant have enjoyed a stellar two years in the lightweight women’s double sculls, not losing since the Tokyo Olympic Games and claiming consecutive gold medals in the European Championships and arriving in Belgrade as reigning world champions.

They began their latest bid with victory over New Zealand, Austria, Peru and Egypt in heat two on Monday, the pair the only entrants to break the seven-minute mark in 6.59.28. The Semi-Final is on Thursday.

The pair have obviously become very close during those successes and Craig, from Pembury, is looking to add another world title to their collection and qualify the boat for the Olympic Games next year in Paris in the process.

That position of having the target on their backs is not one she has found easy to get used to but just as they are in the boat, the pair are calm out of it.

“It is certainly a new position that we have been getting used to this year and trying to lean into it, enjoy it and not panic about it, hopefully we can go out and retain it and retain it in style,” said Craig.

“We both turned up at the hotel we are staying in at the moment with the same book to read, which probably says a lot about how close we are.

“I think that is really important, especially when you are doing four-week long camps, there is always an inevitable point when we have a falling out but we know each other well enough to get it together and move on, talk it out, nothing ever lingers, nothing is ever personal.

“We know what we are doing, we have a lot of trust and we have a lot of clarity in what we do and we go out and practise it every single day, so it becomes quite automatic and then it makes everything very predictable for when people want to throw stuff at us, we can respond and overcome whatever challenges we get faced with.”

While there is still a long way to go before next year’s Olympic Games, there is no doubting that the duo will be clear favourites for gold if they can maintain their current form.

As they have done throughout the past two years though, they are not going to rest on their laurels, as they look to improve on the fourth-place finish in Tokyo when they missed out on the medals by a hundredth of a second.

Craig added: “Tokyo year and everything that happened around that shows that nothing is a guarantee, literally anything can happen - a global pandemic, who knows!

“So it is just about keeping one foot in front of the other, one step at a time - we can’t know what result we are going to get at the end of the day, all we can control is what we do between now and then and how we race it when it comes.”

British Rowing is the governing body for the sport and is responsible for the development of rowing in England and the training and selection of rowers to represent Great Britain. The GB Rowing Team is supported by the National Lottery Sports Fund. To find out more, and to follow the team, head to https://www.britishrowing.org