World champion and European medal cox Morgan Banynham-Williams added yet another major success to her fantastic 2022 season in record style.
The Ross Rowing Club member’s Leander Club women’s four took the championship crown at the 420-boat national Fours Head in London, raced over the 4.25-mile reverse Boat Race course from Mortlake to Putney on Saturday, with crews going off against the clock at 10-second intervals.
Stroked by double 2022 European medallist and Tokyo Olympian Emily Ford, with GB rowers Lauren Irwin, Chloe Brew and Rebecca Edwards behind, the crew covered the Tideway Thames course in a new course record 19 minutes 53.7 seconds to win their category by nine seconds from Oxford Brookes University, with Cambridge University third another 12 seconds back.
It ends a remarkable year for Wye steers-woman Morgan, who helped a GB squad boat win the Windermere Cup in America from a star-studded Washington University crew in Seattle last Spring, before taking European silver in the GB women’s 8 in Munich and beating the US and Australia squads to the Henley Royal Regatta women’s 8s title in the summer.
She was then called in to steer GB’s Paralympic champion four at the worlds in the Czech Republic in September, where they set a new world best time taking gold again—a run of unbeaten success in the boat stretching back a decade.
And last month, she jetted out to Boston in the US for the world’s biggest race, the 2,000 boat Head of the Charles, where her Leander 8 took the women’s championship 8s title.