“I feel very proud to put a medal on the scoreboard for Great Britain”
GB end World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals 2025 with a medal of each colour
Great Britain has finished the 2025 World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals in Antalya, Turkiye with a gold, silver and bronze medal.
Laura McKenzie won a brilliant bronze in the Coastal Women’s Solo (CW1x). She progressed easily through the quarter final against Greece, but lost out in the semi-final to eventual winner Emma Twigg from New Zealand regrouping for the bronze medal race she had a perfect start and led throughout to claim the bronze medal ahead of Spain.
“I’m so happy!” She said speaking after the race. “It feels better to win a race to get a medal. I’ve been in A-final races before, and come away with a silver, which I know is better than a bronze, but when you win a bronze, it’s a different feeling to ‘losing a gold’. This is also one of the first bronze medal races I’ve won because I find that mentally quite challenging, as it’s an all or nothing kind of race.
“This medal means so much because there is a lot of jeopardy in Beach Sprints. You can get knocked out early and it can depend on your luck. So I feel very proud to put a medal up on the scoreboard for Great Britain.”
This year the Inclusion Mixed double sculls (INMix2x) is recognised as a World Champion event. 2024 defending champion Colin Wallace, and new partner Megan Hewison breezed through their semi final to set up a gold medal race against Egypt. It was another classy race. Megan was first to the boat in the sprint and they kept the lead to become the first ever World Champions in this event.
Colin said: “It feels incredible to be an official World Champion. It’s just amazing. Sharing the start line with some inspirational, incredible people, is just unbelievable. I hope that this inspires more people to get involved in Para Rowing and that more Para Beach events will be introduced.”
Megan added: “This has been such a good experience and I’m very happy to have helped Colin become World Champion. I really enjoyed racing today!”.
It was a dramatic 24 hours for the Coastal Mixed coxed quadruple sculls (CMix4x+) who saw Cam Buchan replacing Chris Thompson on medical grounds. The new look crew of Heather Gordon, Cam, Natasha Phillips, Gregor Hall and cox Ryan Glymond were neck and neck with the Turkish boat throughout the race but a thrilling sprint finish saw the home nation take the quarter final win by just 0.35 seconds. “It was an amazing race,” Ryan said, adding “If you go out, you always want to be part of a big fight and that’s definitely what we did today. Turkiye were excellent. They’ve got their home crowd behind them and they were fighting with everything. So congratulations to them.
“I’m just so proud of our guys. This is why we love it. You didn’t know who was going to win at any point in the race. Obviously, this one hurts, but everybody gave everything they had and I couldn’t ask for more than that.”
Earlier in the event, Great Britain won a silver medal in the U19 Coastal Men’s double sculls (CJM2x) when two excellent quarter and semi-final races from Edwin Van Lopik and Valen Giachetto saw them reach the final and win in a close-fought battle with Germany.
Edwin said: “We’ve had a great time out there! In that last race it was challenging to keep the boat going in the right direction and there was a lot going on. But we’ve trained in harder conditions than this and so it’s a testament to the strength of the GB programme that we’ve come away with a medal today.”
Final placings for all other GB crews across the event:
Lucy Whiteley and Emma Nicholson, U19 Coastal Women’s double sculls (CJW2x) 4th overall
Sol Chamberlain-Hyde, U19 Coastal Men’s Solo (CJM1x), last eight
James Cox, Coastal Men’s Solo (CM1x), last 16
Cameron Buchan and Natacha Searson, Coastal Mixed double sculls (CMix2x), last 16
Isabel Soyinka, U19 Coastal Women’s Solo (CJW1x), last 16
Thomas Biddle and Olivia Hodgson, U19 Coastal Mixed double sculls (CJMix2x), last 16
