New Zealand’s Ben Taylor and Oli Welch have defended their world rowing title, winning the men’s pair final on the Bosbaan lake in Amsterdam early on Saturday morning New Zealand time.
The Avon Rowing Club pair led from the first stroke and were never headed, crossing in 6min 16.62sec, close to two seconds clear of Australia’s Angus Dawson and Alexander Hill. Italy’s Matteo Lodo and Giovanni Codato took bronze after running down European champions Romania inside the last 300 metres. Spain and Lithuania filled the remaining places.
World Rowing’s official report on the day’s racing said Welch and Taylor defended the title “in style, charging out of the blocks and not giving anyone else a look-in”. The Australians were the best of the rest, moving clear into second place in the second 500 metres and holding the position to the line.
It was the same race pattern the pair have used all week and the same one that won them gold in Shanghai last year. They were about a second up on the Australians through each of the first three quarters of the race, and although the margin narrowed slightly over the closing 500 metres, the result was never in doubt.
Taylor told RNZ that going back to back had been the plan since the start of the season.
“I guess it was the goal at the start of the season, and I feel that we stayed in that direction the whole way, but there’s always one last race that can knock you over,” he said.
“We were pretty confident during the week that we could do it. But you never know on the day, so we’re pretty stoked to get it done.”
The win puts the two men into a conversation neither of them seems especially keen to join. Hamish Bond and Eric Murray won six world titles and two Olympic gold medals in the men’s pair between 2009 and 2016, and were beaten so rarely that they became known simply as the Kiwi Pair. Until Taylor and Welch won in Shanghai in 2025, Bond and Murray in 2015 were the last New Zealanders to win a world title in the boat class.
Welch said the comparisons were flattering rather than useful.
“There’s a lot of talk around that. It’s pretty awesome to be in the same conversation as them,” he said. “But we kind of do our own thing. We don’t feel like we need to live up that, we just do the best we can and see how it goes.”
The two rowers came to the boat by very different routes. Taylor, who is 26, learned to row at St Andrew’s College in Christchurch and won silver at junior and under 23 world championships before stepping up to the senior team in 2019. He then walked away from the sport for two years, playing rugby and working in construction, and only returned to full time training in 2023. He was named for the Paris Olympics in a double with Phillip Wilson but was replaced by Dan Williamson before the regatta began.
Welch, who is 23, grew up in Auckland and rowed at West End Rowing Club before moving south to Avon in 2022. He won the under 23 world title in the pair in 2024 and took four national titles at the 2025 New Zealand championships.
Put together in 2025, they won at their first regatta as a crew, beating the Croatian Sinkovic brothers, the reigning Olympic champions, at the World Cup event in Varese. They have not slowed down since. Rowing New Zealand said before the championships that the pair “won gold at both World Cup regattas this season and finished just 0.54 seconds outside the Olympic record set by Hamish Bond and Eric Murray in 2012”.
The rest of the New Zealand team had a quieter night on the Bosbaan. The women’s pair of Juliette Lequeux and Katie Lush finished third in their B final, and the men’s double of Ben Mason and Finn Hamill were fourth in theirs.
The New Zealand men’s four, though, still has a medal to race for. Matt Macdonald, Ollie Maclean, Fred Vavasour and Harry Fitzpatrick qualified fifth fastest for Sunday’s A final after finishing third in their semifinal in 6min 00.42sec, behind the Netherlands in 5min 58.70sec and Germany in 6min 00.15sec. The Germans came through from fourth in the last 500 metres and pipped the New Zealanders by 0.27sec.
The crew has been together for only six weeks. Macdonald and Maclean are both Olympic medallists who came back from post Games breaks to row alongside Fitzpatrick, an under 23 international, and Vavasour, who was still at school when Macdonald raced for gold in Tokyo.
“She’s all to play for,” Vavasour said in a Rowing New Zealand report after the semifinal. “We’ve got as good a chance as any.”
Vavasour said the Bosbaan does not make life easy for crews trying to find a rhythm. “It’s swirly,” he said. “Sometimes you feel like you’re really humming along, and then there’s points where you feel like you’ve just been stopped in your tracks.”
Taylor and Welch are not finished either. World Rowing is allowing athletes in Amsterdam to double up in more than one crew, which has let New Zealand put together men’s and women’s eights for the final days of the regatta. Taylor said the pair would take a small celebration and then get on with the eights campaign. The championships finish on Sunday.
What did you make of the row? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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