GUISELEY rower Debbie Flood showed that she has lost little of her edge by taking a year out when she competed in the GB Rowing Team Winter Assessment finals at Dorney Lake in Buckinghamshire.

Twice a silver medal winning Olympian - in Athens and Beijing - Debbie took a year out from rowing to establish her new career in the prison service.

Her former rowing partner Katherine Grainger, three times an Olympic silver medallist, is perennially strong at domestic level and these finals proved no exception.

The St Andrew Boat Club rower led the field in the final of the women’s single scull with Anna Watkins (nee Bebington) of Leander Club, in second place and Gloucester’s Beth Rodford a strong third.

More significantly though the event marked the return to racing of Flood, who placed sixth.

Skipton’s Andy Hodge and his rowing partner Pete Reed, as expected, won the men’s pair but the Molesey-Leander club combination were pushed by their team-mates Alex Partridge and Alex Gregory, of Leander and Reading University, with the latter duo keeping an overlap until the final few hundred metres.

The degree of strength in depth across both the men’s and women’s squads will make for interesting racing in April when the GB Rowing Team Senior Trials take place in Belgium on April 11 and 12.

Placings in Flood’s race were: Women, single scull - 1, Katherine Grainger (St Andrew) 7:39.58; 2, Anna Watkins (Leander) 7:42.38; 3, Beth Rodford (Gloucester) 7:47.70; 4, Louisa Reeve (Leander) 7:49.45; 5, Olivia Whitlam (Agecroft) 7:51.49; 6, Debbie Flood (Leander) 7:56.58.

Flood took her break from the sport whilst she completed her probationary year with the Prison Service. She will return to full-time training with the GB Rowing Squads in April in time for the 2010 season. In November 2009 she won the British Indoor Rowing Championships in Birmingham in a time of 6:52.2.

She was selected in the women’s quadruple scull for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and won her second Olympic silver medal, her first being won in the quad four years earlier in Athens 2004. She is also a double World Champion in the quad, taking the title in 2006 and 2007. In 2007 the quad were also World Cup Champions having won the overall title with two golds and a silver in the three event series. She raced in the quad for the 2008 World Cup series, finishing first and third.

Her international rowing career began with a bronze in the double scull with Frances Houghton at the World Rowing Junior Championships in 1998 and the following year they made an impressive U-23 debut, winning gold at the World Rowing U-23 Championships in Hamburg.

In 2000 Flood also won gold at the World Rowing U-23 Championships, this time in the single. She gained her first senior vest in 2001, finishing seventh in the double scull and sixth in the eight at the World Rowing Championships.

In 2002 she won the World Cup series in the double scull, also with Frances Houghton, after victories at Hazewinkel and Lucerne, and finished fourth at the World Rowing Championships in Seville.

The following season Flood raced with Rebecca Romero, now a cycling world champion, in the double throughout the season culminating in a fourth place at the World Rowing Championships in Milan.

In 2004 Flood, a former Skyrac AC athlete and judo exponent, raced in the women’s quad. In the Olympic Games in Athens they qualified for the final by winning their heat and although they were unable to catch the fast-starting Germans they came through the field in great style to win an emphatic silver medal.

Flood raced for much of the 2005 season in a double scull with Elise Laverick, winning a bronze at the World Cup in Lucerne and finishing fifth in the World Rowing Championships in Japan.

The World Cup in 2006 brought gold with the women’s quad in each of Poznan, Munich and Lucerne.

At the 2006 World Rowing Championships the women’s quadruple scull fought an intense battle with Russia and were just beaten to the line in the dying metres of the race to take silver. In a strange twist of fate, their Russian conquerors later fell foul of a drugs test and the British women’s quartet were restored, in February 2007, as rightful World Champions once more.

Flood was a GB junior judo international and a county level 1500m and cross-country runner and shot putter before she took up rowing and her strength and athletic ability ensured rapid progress. She won the Junior title at the 1997 British Indoor Rowing Championships and the 1998 World Indoor Rowing Championships and then took the U-23 title at the British Indoor Rowing Championships in 1999.

She moved south to study physiology and biochemistry at Reading University, from where she graduated in 2005.