Sophia Vitas and Kristi Wagner made the most of their return to the A Final with a bronze medal they earned by rowing through the field with a strong middle thousand. It is the first medal for the USA in the women's double since 2018.

Romania's Olympic champions, Simona Radis and Ancuta Bodnar repeated as champions well ahead of the field, and the Lithuanian crew got to the line just ahead of the charging US crew.

Vitas and Wagner did not see Romania or Lithuania At the Varese World Cup in their first race together this season, or in the earlier rounds this week.

Just past the line, in the tight finish with Lithuania

When asked whether not seeing all the European crews or being able to do more world cup racing was a disadvantage in any way, Wagner said no.

"I like to try to see things more as to our advantage than not, and we do a lot of like inter squad racing," she said. "A race is a race. It doesn't really matter who you're against."

You can watch the video replay of the race here

Here are the rest of the comments the medalists made afterwards while waiting for the medal ceremony:

Kristi Wagner

You always want to get up here after the last race and I feel like it's steps in the right direction.

Sophia Vitas

It feels good. It feels like we're reaping some rewards of putting so much work into it and its nice to have a medal to show for it.

Kristi Wagner, on racing today

I feel like if you've made it to today, you were lucky. Today was probably the best day [for weather] that we had so far.

Sophia Vitas

The more time we have together in the boat, the more trust we're building, so that is starting to pay off a little bit. Just having time in the boat together is key.

Kristi Wagner

We watched the lightweights [yesterday] walk through the field in the middle 1k yesterday, so we thought, if they can do it, we can do it.

We have trained a lot and gone through a lot of camps with everybody [on the US team], so seeing all the boats doing really well, qualifying and ending up on the podium, is so exciting. Yesterday's bus ride home was a little distracting [laughing] with the men's four celebrating their medal, but I'm so happy for them. They worked really hard.

Read about the other US medal winners here.