GREAT Britain have won the gold medal in the men's coxless four at the Rio Olympics.

Former Evesham rower Alex Gregory, Mohamed Sbihi, George Nash and Constantine Louloudis powered to victory over the second-placed Australians in five minutes 58.61 seconds with Italy taking bronze.

The men's four have won five Olympic gold medals in a row with Gregory part of the successful crew at London 2012.

Gregory, 32, Sbihi, Nash and Louloudis held off their rivals in Brazil to triumph by 1.83 seconds at the Lagoa.

It was GB's second Olympic rowing gold in 20 minutes after Helen Glover and Heather Stanning stormed to victory in the women's pair to retain their title in style.

Former Prince Henry's High School pupil Gregory revealed that waiting for the race to begin felt worse than London 2012.

He admitted: "I didn't know what was happening four years ago but today sitting on the start line was horrible, it was tortuous.

"But we nailed that. It was our perfect race at the right time on the right day."

Their success continued Jurgen Grobler's run of coaching a gold medal-winning crew at every Olympics since 1972 and GB's dominance of the men's four that started at Sydney 2000 when Sir Steve Redgrave won his fifth and final gold medal.

Nash said: "I'll say that was spot on. We had a good hand there. The three of these guys are the strongest rowers out there and we played a full hand today. Just an epic, epic, row.

"We knew we had to go off hard to counter the Australians in the first 1,000 (metres) and they kept challenging but we kept answering and we always came up with the goods. That's just what we trained for."

Sbihi said the team were wary of the threat posed by Australia, adding: "In the last race at Poznan they challenged us at the 900/1,000-metre mark so we knew it was coming.

"We had a plan and we knew at the (1,000m mark) we could step on and we did. I called it and the guys responded. It's a fantastic crew. We just executed our plan right to the last word."