Athens World Cup

Traditional Greek dancing at the opening ceremony


Athens whitewater course


So yeah, it was not my best day of racing yesterday...........but I got a lot of important things out of it being my first big international race of the year. It started going bad for our 6 person kiwi team when Tania and Sarah got 50 second penalties and had paddle backs. Then Jarade had a 50 and 10 touches, mike didn’t tie his helmet on very well and it almost came off half way down the course, Johann had some bad touches and I got off line half way down my second run which put me out for the rest of the gates.

I felt really good going into my first run, no nerves and I felt pumped. It ended up as a very standard sort of run and left me in 34th place with only 1 second separating competitors 30th-34th a very close margin. There was a lot of room for improvement so there was no doubt in my mind that if I raced a little faster and corrected my mistakes I would easily make semifinals (top 30 placing) in my next run.
I minted the top of the course and corrected the mistakes from my first run until gate 8 when my boat spun out and I just couldn’t get back online for the rest of the run. This was disappointing as I had been practising most of the moves during training this week and really did them well. I am quite gutted about it all but shit happens sometimes.

I saw the finals today and I have never seen so many paddlers get 50 second penalties or just have to paddle back for gates in a world cup race EVER. That just shows how technical this course was.

I am optimistic about next weekend where we have the next world cup in Augsburg, Germany on Friday and Saturday. This is a course I know very well having spent so much time there before.