Fourteen-year-old Jamie Rimmer from Walworth completed a spectacular double at the Italian national rowing championships last month.
Jamie, who is a year 9 pupil at St Thomas the Apostle Catholic School in Nunhead, travelled to Rome to take part in the Italian C2 Open RowErg Championship, and C2 Sprint Championship.
Although branded an indoor rowing Championship, the event was held outdoors at the magnificent and picturesque Olympic Park, Stadio dei Marmi – Stadium of Marbles – in sweltering 30 degree heat.
On the opening day of the competition, Jamie powered home to win the Junior 14s 1500m event by a 34-metre, 7.2 second margin in a winning time of five minutes, 6.4 seconds (a split-time of 1m:42sec).
The following day, which was the Sprint day, Jamie won his second Italian race, this time over 500m in a very impressive one minute 33.8 seconds with a 2.8 second, fifteen-metre gap back to second place. Jamie’s winning time would have given him silver in the older fifteen-, sixteen-year-old event.
Commenting on his achievements, Jamie said: “I felt sorry for the Italian boys that I had come and ‘stolen’ both the golds in their National Championships.
“It does seem a bit odd that it is a ‘National’ championship but open to an International entry. But those were the rules so I was able to compete.
“Everyone was really friendly and welcoming to me and made quite a big fuss of me after my first win. On Sunday everyone seemed to know me and so it was a great competition and an awful lot of fun.
“I was delighted to win as I took part in the UK National Junior Indoor Rowing Championship (NJIRC) back in March and only finished fifth from an entry of 841 boys (and 25th from all 3866 all-ages secondary school boys), which was my first indoor rowing competition.
“I took part in that competition five weeks after I broke my shoulder and had not been able to train at all for the competition. The NJIRC is very much a schools’ competition.
“I am trying to encourage my school to get involved with indoor rowing and enter a team next year. I would recommend the sport to all schools.
“My ambition is to make up for my NJIRC defeat by trying to win the British Rowing Indoor Championship in November.”
Jamie gave an insight into what training involves.
He said: “The indoor rowing machine is a great substitute for not being able to get on the water. I row for Team Keane based in Brentford but can only get to the club to train on the water at the weekends.
“My school have been really supportive of my rowing activities, giving me loads of encouragement and allowing me time out to take part in events. As much as I really like my school I would love to be able to go to one of the top rowing schools.
“Indoor rowing is really good for fitness. I started using the indoor rowing machine last summer when after Covid I realised how much my weight had shot up. I knew I was getting heavy but never realised how much weight I had put on. I got on the scales one day and was horrified to see that I was 98kg.
“By rowing for 10 minutes a day, at what I thought at the time was a quite hard, intense pace, I managed to reduce my weight to 77kg in three months.”