With just a month to go before the 2026 World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals, athletes will have pretty much wrapped up their annual training cycles and national team selectors will have mostly made their decisions. Big new performance gains will be unlikely, or at least any that come will have been built on all the hard work of the last 11 months, and unknown rowers won’t jump out of nowhere to make their country’s lineup in Qingdao.
But the final few tests ahead of China should still give an intriguing preview of what to expect at worlds, and the biggest of those final tests are next week’s European championships in La Línea, Spain. Wild Rowing’s rankings assign a score of up to 600 points for continental regattas, and the African and European championships are the only two that haven’t yet been added in. (There is no date set for the African championships this year.)
Many of the top ranked beach sprint rowers worldwide are European. Across the current top-five tables, there are just five non-European rowers: Australia’s Isabella Scammell and New Zealand’s Emma Twigg in the women’s solos, America’s Chris Bak and China’s Zhijin Li in the men’s, and America’s Sera Busse and Bak again in the women’s and men’s lists for the mixed double. Once European results get counted, there could be significant changes.
Bak is currently top of the men’s solo ranking with 2,000 points. Spain’s Ander Martín is second with 1,480 and Germany’s Moritz Wolff is third on 1,440. That means Bak is catchable, just. Should either Martín or Wolff take the European title, they’ll also secure top spot.
In the women’s solos, Lithuania’s Raminta Morkunaite could knock reigning world champion Twigg, who has been recovering from injury, out of the top five by reaching the quarter finals at least. Austria’s Magdalena Lobnig, with 1,720 points, looks certain to retain the No. 1 position over Great Britain’s Laura McKenzie (1,380), though McKenzie will be focused on reversing the result from last year to seal these championships with gold.
Down in 16th place, Spain’s Esther Briz could be an interesting rower to watch. A double world champion in the mixed double, she’s been transitioning back to beach sprint over the last few months, and her 560 points aren’t necessarily representative of where she might finish. With a win, and a little bit of luck, Briz could leap up into the top five.
In the mixed double tables, one for women and one for men, the Lithuanian duo of Martyna Kazlauskaite and Dominykas Jancionis are essentially untouchable at the top. The reigning world champions over the last two years, they both have 1,730 points, and their closest competitors are Busse and Bak. No European rowers are close enough on points to knock them down, regardless of the results.
WIld Rowing will update the rankings again at the beginning of next month, including the results from La Línea and any last minute key regattas. For more information on the rankings and to view the top 32 rowers in the senior categories, visit the Beach Sprint World Rankings.