ROWING: Pritchard retains world title with championship record in Amsterdam

Ben Pritchard is world champion again.

The Welsh para-rower, who grew up in Mumbles and now lives in Ammanford, retained his PR1 men’s single sculls title at the World Rowing Championships in Amsterdam, crossing the line in eight minutes 50.46 seconds to set a championship record.

It is the fastest time recorded in the event at a World Championships, and short only of the 8:40.38 world best Pritchard himself set at the 2025 European Championships in Plovdiv.

After a strong start, Italy’s Giacomo Perini and Australian Erik Horrie closed on him towards the 500m mark before the 34-year-old stretched away, eventually winning by 6.81 seconds.

The victory means Pritchard holds the Paralympic, world and European titles at the same time, having won gold in Paris in 2024 and the European crown in both 2025 and 2026, in Varese.

It is also back-to-back world titles, following his first in Shanghai last September.

Amsterdam did not make it straightforward. Thunderstorms on Friday delayed the semi-finals, cutting the recovery time available to the field.

He told World Rowing afterwards that it had been a “story of calamities”, and noted that his rivals are “getting faster off the first 500”.

“But you’ve just got to try and back yourself, back all the training that you do,” he said.

“We’re in some lovely Welsh weather at the moment, some liquid sunshine, so it’s great that all the training that I do on the Tawe back home.”

Pritchard, who rows for City of Swansea Rowing Club, was paralysed from the waist down in a cycling crash in September 2016 and took up rowing during rehabilitation at Stoke Mandeville.

Since Paralympic gold in Paris he has set multiple world records and added European and world titles, and was named BBC Cymru Wales Sports Personality of the Year in December.

The distance travelled is best measured against the piece we ran as he set off for the 2023 World Championships in Belgrade, a bronze medallist then, hoping to change the colour of his medal.

He has since won everything the sport has to offer, and is now winning it twice.