Riches, along with fellow Paralympic champion Pamela Relph, Oliver Hester, James Fox and cox Oliver James, held off the challenge from Italy to take the world title in a time of 3min 16.12sec - within half-a-second of the world best time - as the Italians won silver more than five seconds behind and South Africa followed in third for bronze.

"This one is very special because I feel for the first time we set a race plan and executed it so well," Riches said upon securing her sixth world title.

"It's the first time in all those years that I feel that we did everything 100 per cent.

"Today we had a really good race.

"We set off with the idea that we were going to be super-relaxed and not let what anyone else did faze us.

"It's so nice with a brand new crew to have that faith."

Elsewhere, in the AS women's single sculls Russia's Natalia Bolshakova annihilated the field to take 12 seconds off the previous world best time and secure the world title ahead of Paralympic champion and holder of the previous world record time Alla Lysenko of Ukraine, who narrowly missed out on a medal in fourth.

Norway's Birgit Skarstein ran Bolshakova close for the majority of the race, but the Russian stormed clear in the sprint as Skarstein crossed in second for silver and Brazil's Claudia Santos stole bronze from Lysenko.

Australia's Erik Horrie took the world AS men's single sculls world title in a world best time


Britain's four-time world champion Tom Aggar fell just short of the medals in the AS men's single sculls as Paralympic silver medallist Erik Horrie of Australia lived up to his billing to clinch the gold in a time of 4:35.98, taking nearly 10 seconds off the previous world best time.

Ukrainian Igor Bondar put in a valiant performance to claim silver, also coming in under the previous world record mark, while Paralympic bronze medallist Alexey Chuvashev of Russia added a World Championship medal of the same colour to his collection.

There was more gold for Australia as Gavin Bellis and Kathryn Ross held off competition from the Ukrainian and French pairs to take the world title in the TA mixed double sculls.

Both the Ukrainian pairing of Iryna Kyrychenko and Dmytro Ivanov and the Australians had to qualify via another race yesterday, but it seemed to have little impact on their performances as Ukraine took the bronze behind the French pair of Perle Bouge and Stéphane Tardieu.

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