The Bosbaan's reputation for speed will be tested again this week, when the World Rowing Championships return to the Amsterdam course that produced one of the sport's most remarkable days.
Eleven years ago, on 29 August 2014, the famous stretch of water yielded a cluster of world best times that still stand today. Grace Prendergast was there, racing the Women's Four, and remembers exactly how the day unfolded.
Australia's Sally Kehoe and Olympia Aldersey set the tone, winning their semifinal in 6:37.31, a mark that has never been beaten. Croatia's Martin and Valent Sinkovic matched that intensity in the Men's Double semifinal, clocking 5:59.72.
A tailwind was blowing that day, and with lanes reseeded to reward the fastest heat times with the best water, Prendergast could sense what was coming.
"I remember watching and being like, 'It's clearly very fast' which obviously plants a seed for your own race," says Prendergast, who's back at the Bosbaan this week working in the media team for World Rowing.
"I think everyone knows the Bosbaan can be very quick on a good day but also punishing if you don't row it well. So, I think there was that sense of like, 'Oh gosh, this could be great, but it also could be very, very challenging.'"
Chasing speed for its own sake rarely works, she says.
"In our experience when we were racing to go fast it sometimes doesn't work out very well because you're just thinking about a result rather than what you're actually doing in that moment, so you didn't want to focus on it too much."
The build-up hadn't been smooth, either. Prendergast and Kerri Williams had just won the pair at the U23 World Championships when they were told, almost as they were packing to fly home, that they'd instead be staying on to race the Four with Kelsey Bevan and Kayla Pratt.
"It was a pretty rocky build up," Prendergast says. "I got quite sick, Kerri might have got sick, Kayla came off her bike and injured herself. There wasn't actually a lot of time we were in the boat."
None of that showed when the crew lined up. Commentators were talking world best time by halfway.
New Zealand crossed in 6:14.36, a mark that still stands, and remarkable given the coxless four wasn't even an Olympic event at the time.
Straight after that race, Hamish Bond, Eric Murray and cox Caleb Shepherd won the Men's Coxed Pair in 6:33.26, another world best that has never fallen. Four more crews set world best times that same day, in the Lightweight Men's Pair, Four and Quad, and the Lightweight Women's Quad. All of them remain unbeaten more than a decade on.
Fast water, the right conditions, the right crews. That's the Bosbaan at its best.
Prendergast thinks this year's fields could finally put some of those old numbers under real pressure.
