Sonia Waddell
New Zealand rower and racing cyclist
Sonia Waddell (née Scown; born 19 February 1973) is a New Zealand athlete. She represented her country at a World Junior Championship in hurdles before becoming a rower, in which sport she was twice an Olympic competitor and where she won silver at a World Rowing Championship. She later competed as a cyclist and won medals at a UCI Para-cycling Track World Championship as a sighted guide.
Private life
Waddell is the daughter of former All Black Alistair Scown and sister of rugby player Hayden Scown. In 1998, she married fellow rower Rob Waddell. Rower Rebecca Scown is her cousin.
Sports career
Athletics
Waddell represented New Zealand in the 400 m hurdles at the 1990 World Junior Championships in Athletics in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
Rowing
She first represented her country in rowing at the 1995 World Rowing Championships in Tampere, Finland, where she came ninth in the women's quadruple sculls. From 1997 onwards, she competed in the single sculls, and at the World Rowing Championships in 1997, 1998, and 1999, she placed tenth, tenth, and fifth, respectively. At the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics, she continued to compete in the single sculls, placing sixth and fifth, respectively.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sonia Waddell” is new Zealand rower and racing cyclist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sonia, Waddell and Zealand, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7561767. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1998, 1990 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sonia Waddell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.