Emma Harvey raced against the Olympic champion in the heats of the 100 metres backstroke in France today.

Harvey, who celebrated her 23rd birthday in the Olympic Village last week, finished eighth in heat four in a time of 1min 01.78sec behind Kaylee McKeown of Australia (58.48), the winner in Tokyo.

Also competing in the heat was another Australian, Iona Anderson, who won silver in the event at this year’s world championships, and Carmen Weiler Sastre, a former junior European champion from Spain.

Harvey’s time was not enough to make the semi-final as she finished 23rd of the 36 swimmers, with just 16 making it through to the next round of the competition.

Also in action today was rower Dara Alizadeh, who won his E/F semi-final in the men’s singles sculls.

Alizadeh is battling it out with fellow rowers who failed to make it through the heats and repechage to discover their overall finishing position at the regatta.

Crossing the line in a time of 7:33.38, Alizadeh had more than three seconds to spare at the finish over runner-up Stephen Cox, of Zimbabwe, and Thailand’s Premanut Wattananusith.

He now faces a long wait to contest the E final, which takes place on Saturday at 6.43am Bermuda time, but that race is not where he wants to be and he was disappointed to finish third in the Repechage on Monday.

“It’s certainly disappointing,” Alizadeh said.

“The Repechage was the big dramatic race. I’ve been in that situation before, thinking back to the qualifiers I was in that exact situation just on the other side, sitting back and having to row through in the last 150 metres or so. As fun as that was, it was that **** this time to be rowed through.

“But I have to give credit to those guys and I was outclassed, so I just let myself wallow in that for a little bit but then I had to get my bum out of my behind and move on to the next race. You can either feel sorry for yourself and continue to spiral and get all the sympathy in the world or if you want to put in a good performance you are going to need to snap out of it.

“I am trying to take the latter path and I’m happy with what I did today. I’m not where I want to be but I still have a job to do and keep racing. I’m at the Olympics, I’m going to be damned if I’m going to waste a race because I feel bad.”