The intention was to select a crew and then make minimal changes prior to Munich. At the time, both the World Rowing Championships and the Summer Olympic Games were held at four-year intervals, and the annual European Rowing Championships in the in-between years were regarded as having quasi-world championship status. Rowing officials decided Watkinson would revert to single sculls, and for Storey to return to the coxed four. Cawood was no longer available. The three were replaced by three developing rowers—Lindsay Wilson, Joe Earl, and Trevor Coker—and they were teamed with the other young rower, Gary Robertson, to form the bow of the boat. The biggest selection surprise was Earl, as he had just turned 18. Although coached by Strachan at St. Andrew's College in Christchurch and known to all but one of the selectors, Earl himself doubted that he would have been chosen ahead of more experienced oarsmen. The experienced rowers chosen for the stern—Cole, Veldman, Joyce, and Hunter—were kept from the 1970 crew. The day before the team was to assemble in Christchurch for their first training, Cole pulled out for family reasons. Tony Hurt from Auckland was chosen to replace him. Joyce was the initial stroke, but this did not work out. He was replaced by Hurt who, although from a sculling background and, at and small for a rower, worked out well for the team. Veldman called him "a brilliant stroke". On Sunday afternoon, the four stern rowers and their bow counterparts would race each other in coxless fours. Dickie recalls that the experienced rowers in the stern had a slight edge, but they did not win every time, and there was great rivalry. The crew arrived in Europe to find that both their new four and eight Italian Donoratico boats were unsatisfactory. Joyce applied his engineering skills and moved all seats backwards, and that improved the boats' performances. Regattas were rowed in Duisburg and Klagenfurt, and the New Zealanders set new course records at both venues. At the European Rowing Championships, held at the Danish Lake Bagsværd north of Copenhagen, the favoured East Germans, but also the West Germans, also set new course records in their heat, only to be bettered by the New Zealanders in their heat. In the semi-final, New Zealand faced the Soviet Union, the team that had narrowly beaten them for second place at the 1970 World Championships.