Dutch Olympic Champion Florijn and Lithuania’s Olympic Bronze Medallist Senkutė Headline Fourth Golden Oar Composite Crew

  • Dutch Olympic Champion Florijn and Lithuania’s Olympic Bronze Medallist Senkutė Headline Fourth Golden Oar Composite Crew image

Karolien Florijn, Viktorija Senkutė, Finn Hamill and Ben Mason bring Olympic and World Cup pedigree to Lake Burley Griffin

Golden Oar’s international guest list keeps growing, with Dutch Olympic champion Karolien Florijn set to join Lithuania’s Viktorija Senkutė and New Zealand’s Finn Hamill and Ben Mason in a fourth international composite crew for the 2026 event. Between them, the four bring Olympic gold and bronze, back-to-back World Championship titles, and a Henley Royal Regatta win to the water.

Karolien Florijn, from the Netherlands, is the reigning Olympic champion in the women’s single sculls, having won gold at Paris 2024 after taking silver in the coxless four at Tokyo 2020. Florijn backed that up with back-to-back World Championship titles in the single sculls (2022, 2023) and five European titles between 2019 and 2023, topping the overall World Rowing Cup standings in 2022. At the 2026 World Championships in Amsterdam, Florijn added a further bronze in the single sculls, finishing behind Great Britain’s Lauren Henry and Ireland’s Fiona Murtagh in one of the most stacked fields the event has seen.

Viktorija Senkutė, of Lithuania, made history at Paris 2024, becoming the first Lithuanian rower to win an Olympic medal in the single sculls with her bronze-medal finish. Senkutė followed it with silver at the 2026 European Championships and a fifth-place finish at the 2026 World Championships in Amsterdam.

Finn Hamill and Ben Mason race as one of the world’s most consistent men’s doubles, having won the Double Sculls Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta in 2025 and collected three World Rowing Cup medals together: bronze at Varese 2025, silver at Lucerne 2025, and silver at Plovdiv 2026. The pair also finished inside the top 10 at both the 2025 and 2026 World Championships.

This composite crew joins a rapidly growing field confirmed for Golden Oar 2026, alongside the Irish-Kiwi crew of Fintan McCarthy, Philip Doyle, Margaret Cremen and Ella Cossill, the trans-Tasman line-up of Lucy Spoors, Brooke Francis, Alex Hill and Angus Dawson, and Serbia’s Martin Mačković and Nikolaj Pimenov, who team up with Germany’s Juliane Faralisch and the USA’s Sophia Vitas.

Canberra’s premier international rowing festival, presented by Canberra Airport and hosted by Red Shed, takes place from 30 October to 1 November on the iconic waters of Lake Burley Griffin at Black Mountain Peninsula.

For more details, visit goldenoar.com.au or follow on Instagram

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