Problem with SQL Distinct

Does anybody know why this isn't working:

SELECT DISTINCT(rowerid), age, weight, city, state, country, date_rowed, distance, time, comments FROM workouts WHERE distance='500' ORDER BY time ASC

It displays everything, even if the rowerid is the same, which it shouldn't...

distinct doesn't work like that. its not a function. It will pull out unique rows, not based on a single column. everything in each row of the result must be unique or else it will not consider it distinct. If the workouts table has a auto_increment id column, and you want to pull out a list of the last workout from each unique rowerid, you can do:

the subquery gets a list of just the largest id number from workouts for each rowerid and then the main query will get the data for each id in that subquery.

Thanks for your help. It doesn't quite work as it is for a leaderboard, and the row-id does not indicated placement. I played with it and tried changing column names, but it still doesn't work.

Unless you have a better suggestion, I will just add a column at the end of the table indicating if it is the "ranked" one or not and check every time they insert a time and update it.