THEY didn’t made it easy for themselves but a splash of British grit and a fast finish later and Jessica Eddie and Great Britain’s women’s eight crew had written their names into the history books with a silver medal.

Not since women’s rowing was introduced into the Olympic program in 1976 has there been a British female eight crew on the podium.

But that all changed on Saturday in Rio as the crew of Eddie, Katie Greves, Melanie Wilson, Frances Houghton, Polly Swann, Olivia Carnegie-Brown, Karen Bennett and Zoe Lee held off Romania on the line to take second behind the United States.

More impressive still is that the Brits had been dead last at the halfway stage before a late push moved them up into medal contention.

And after fifth-place finishes at her last two Olympics in Beijing 2008 and four years later in London, Eddie admitted finally getting her hands on a medal would take some getting used to.

“To be honest I feel a bit dazed right now but I think it’s going to sink it big style later,” she said.

“In Beijing we were actually a very good crew but we had some sickness and lost two girls before the final.

“London we had a lot of injuries and we weren’t really anywhere.

“Coming here, I’ve never been going into a final knowing we could win it.

“We fully believed we had to go out and try and win that race. That was definitely going through our heads the last 500m.

“We’ve been talking a lot about what our strengths were and we tried to adjust our race plan a bit to go with other countries.

“It’s a non contact sport, we don’t affect other lanes. We need to play to our strengths and do what we’re good at and just by chance we have a lot of good finishes.

“We have a turn of pace, we discussed a few weeks ago now how we wouldn’t be scared if we were down a few seats at the one kilometre mark."

The silver on the last day of rowing competition at Rio 2016 took Great Britain’s tally of female medals to three with gold for Helen Glover and Heather Stanning in the women’s pair and another second place  for Katherine Grainger and Vicky Thornley in the lightweight double sculls.

And Eddie, who will next month turn her attentions to a starting a masters degree in history of design, took time out to reflect on her own personal journey.

“I’ve been on this project and been a part of the national team since 2004. I was 19 then. There are so many people who have added to this project,” she added.

“You think about nine women in a boat, we’ve seat raced against 20 odd women and they all thought they could get into this boat and that’s just this year.

“For every woman you see there are four other women behind us who are our friends, our colleagues, teammates and each of them has pushed us to where we are.

“We’ve done a really good job, the team, coaches. We’ve set a really high bar. It’s not like we don’t know what the standard is.”

Aldi is the first Official Supermarket partner of Team GB and has been championing  our nation’s extraordinary athletes on their Road to Rio and encouraging the public to tuck into fresh, affordable, Great British food. For more information visit aldi.co.uk