William Webb (rower)
New Zealand rower and World Champion sculler
William Charles Webb (21 January 1880 – 2 October 1960) was the first New Zealander to hold the professional World Sculling Championship title. He was also known as Bill or Billy Webb.
Early life
Webb was born at Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch, New Zealand, on 21 January 1880 and was educated at Christchurch Boys' High School. In his youth he was a natural athlete being prominent in running and cycling but he turned his attention to rowing. He won various amateur events between 1896 and 1905/06, not only in single sculls but also in doubles and fours. In his last season as an amateur he won the Champion Single Sculls and the Champion Double Sculls events at Picton, and later the Senior Single Sculls at Wanganui, and thus became the amateur New Zealand champion. By this time Webb had moved to Wanganui to live and he spent the rest of his life there. After winning the amateur events he decided to turn professional.
Professional sculling
New Zealand champion
His first professional race was for the New Zealand Sculling Championship against Jim Stanbury, an Australian who was five times World Champion from 1891 to 1896 and again from 1905 to mid 1906. The race was run on the Whanganui River on 26 December 1906, with a purse of £200 a side.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Webb (rower)” 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.