Remenham Challenge 2014

The Remenham Challenge held on the 13th of December presented the final chance to get out and race for the year of 2014 and involved all the racing squads at the club. The Remenham Challenge is an event held annually between the founding Remenham Clubs namely; London Rowing Club, Vesta Rowing Club, Thames Rowing Club, Twickenham Rowing Club, Kingston Rowing Club, Molesey Boat Club and Staines Boat Club. Racing conditions were almost perfect and the Thames contingent did not disappoint with a near clean sweep of pennant wins!

As defending champions the TRC men’s elite eight lead the field down the track and comfortably reclaimed the pennant but were closely followed by the 2nd eight who were a mere 10 seconds back on total time and in turn won the intermediate pennant with the unofficial ‘performance of the day’. A very scratch crew made of a combination of a variety of crews also finished in a very good 5th position, just 4 seconds behind Kingston’s 1st 8, which shows the strong racing ability and conditioning of the squad, given this eight had never rowed together before in any shape and contained guys from the full range of the squad.

On the women's side, the club managed a clean sweep of wins with the novice, intermediate and senior eights all pulling off comfortable wins showing the club is strong across the full spectrum of abilities.

The two blips on the TRC pennant winning radar were the Masters Eight stroked by Stephen Dooley and with the captain on board, they fell a little short of their old foes from LRC, as did our very strong novice men’s eight who can be proud of their performance in that they were closer to the Men’s top 8 than a year ago. They will no doubt rally after that squads first defeat in some time.

There were one or two sore heads for the battle paddling and plum puds on Sunday!