English Indoors

Three members of the senior men’s squad raced at the annual English Indoor Rowing Championships on the 30th January, hosted inside the Manchester Velodrome.

Two of the rowers were in the fastest race of the day – the Open Heavyweight men’s event, a race that usually requires a sub 6.20 to medal…

Ewan Cameron, a novice from last year completed his 2k in the time of 6.49.9 and finished 9th overall – punching well above his age range where most of the competitors were in there 20’s. Benjamin Twiney a relatively new member was competing at his first indoor rowing event and smashed his PB in the impressive time of 6.28.7! Unfortunately this wasn’t fast enough to medal against some brutally fast heavyweights – including Sergey Surovov who pulled a 1.06 split on his 500m race later on in the day!

Men’s Captain Ben Gittus-Smith had to fight for his gold medal in the Open Lightweight event against current GB triallist Elliot Barton. Both rowers rowed within 0.1-0.3 seconds of each other for the first 1700metres in a tense battle – the Stratford lightweight only pulled ahead with 30 strokes to go with an almighty push, which the Commonwealth rowing gold medallist could not respond to, finally ending up two seconds behind Ben’s 6.26.0 PB.

Ben Gittus-Smith has now won the Open Lightweight category at the British, Welsh and the English Indoor Rowing events for 2010/11