Ron Rhodes

Ron Rhodes started competitive canoeing and kayaking with the Canoe Touring Club before joining the established Royal Canoe Club. As a 20-year-old, he won the prestigious 12-mile Barry (Wales) to Weston-super-Mare race in what was the first race win of his career.

Internationally, Rhodes’ finest moment came at the 1959 Canoe Sprint European Championships when he won the bronze medal in the kayak singles 1,000 metres behind top Hungarians, Imre Szöllősi (double Olympic silver medallist in 1960) and Lajos Kiss (1956 Olympic bronze medallist). Rhodes was serving his two year’s National Service in the Royal Air Force (RAF) at the time.

Shortly after gaining selection for the 1960 Roma Olympics, Rhodes and Bob Lowery won the inaugural open sprint championship on the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park by beating the strong Yugoslavian pair of Jovanovic and Zaric. At the Roma Games, Rhodes finished a creditable fifth in the kayak singles 1,000 metres in a race that saw Sweden’s Gert Fredriksson win the bronze medal. It was the eighth and last medal of the Swede’s Olympic career, stretching over four Games. Rhodes also reached the semi-final of the 4 × 500 metres kayak relay in Roma.

In 1961, Rhodes and captain Bill Crook of the Lancashire Regiment set the record for the fastest two-man canoe crossing of the English Channel in a time of 3-20:30, breaking the seven-year record by 17 minutes. Sadly, Rhodes’s career came to an end in 1962 when he was killed when the motor cycle he had owned for just eight weeks was in collision with a stationary lorry near Twickenham Bridge, not far from his Fulham home. He was on his way home from work as a glazier. Rhodes is buried in the same cemetery as a cousin of his, who was also killed in a lorry crash some years earlier.