Success in Ivrea, Italy International C class race

Our hard mans race on the snow. You can see me in the middle of the picture running back down the slope and mike just behind me.


The big holes at the bottom of the Ivrea course

24/6/06

We were up at the crack of dawn to drive 2 hours for an international C Class race in Ivrea, Italy. We decided to race without ever having been on the race course before which like last weekend was a very good way to learn to read the water and to prepare to race just on the day. The drive there through the alps into Italy was incredible. Heaps of high altitude skiing towns, lots of snow and incredible grade 5+ rapids and waterfalls ever couple of kilometres. Then, in Italy itself we drove through a huge valley surrounded by massive, steep mountains with green covered cliffs, like something out of Jurassic park.

The slalom course in Ivrea was everything we were told it would be. An excellent grade 3,4 course build off the side of a huge weir with continual rapids all the way down including some very gnarly stoppers at the finish line.
The start list included national representative level paddlers from Australia, Great Britain, France, Italy and of course us kiwis.

Qualifications for us was a bit of a warm up for the finals later in the afternoon. I did reasonably well in qualifications gaining a surprised 4th place. In the actual final I pulled down a really fast time ending up in a very happy 4th place.

After the race I did another run race run down the course which was 5 seconds faster again than my fastest run during the finals race. This was good to know that I can still paddle much faster if I get everything right.

Unfortunately, Sarah who had been having problems with her shoulder in the last few days dislocated it on the last big stopper on the race course. She was rushed to hospital where they took x-rays and then put it back in place. She will be going home next week as now she cant paddle for 8 months.

We finished the day travelling back over the alps where we had a HARD MANS race where Mike and I ran 50 metres out onto the snow and back with bare feet. I was so numb after that which was then followed by a big snow fight.