On the Podium Down Under

This weekend has been my first International Race of the year and there was a high quality start line here for the Australian Open, with many of the World’s top athletes competing. My final run didn’t quite go to plan in C1, taking a roll near the bottom of the course, and I finished in 6th place.  It was a tough race and not too bad a start to the year. I was pleased to have at least made the final with some good boats missing out including Olympic Champion, Michal Martikan, who could only manage 14th place.

In C2 Richard and I were pleased with our performance. We were paddling consistently well throughout the competition. We made it onto the podium in third place with a small two second penalty in the final costing us the gold. There are still things I’m working on in C1 and the same applies to C2 and it was good to have a race early in the year as we prepare for Olympic selections. The training camp here has just about come to an   end and we’ll soon be back to training in London.

Sun, White Water and Concrete!

Have been out in Australia for a few days now and am getting over jet-lag and settled into training. I’m here yet again for some warm weather winter training at the Sydney Olympic course in Penrith. Though it’s been mild back training in London so far this winter, it’s great to be out here training in the warmth. Conditions have been perfect so far and it’s also good to have the variety and new stimulus of training somewhere different. With most of the top canoe slalom athletes in the world descending upon the Penrith Whitewater Stadium it’s also a great chance to see others in training. My coach arrives here today and tomorrow start three hard weeks of training before a race at the end of the camp.

Back to my Roots

With the Olympic course in Lee Valley closed for the week over Christmas and New Year, I put my canoe on my roof-rack and made the long drive back up home to Edinburgh to spend a very enjoyable week back home with my family. The first ever slalom training I had done was in Edinburgh just a five minute walk from my house on a little basin on the small river running through central Edinburgh, the Water of Leith. We had hung a couple of bamboo canes from a bridge to create slalom poles and my Dad had taught my brother, Fraser, and I the basic paddle strokes to canoe around the gate in an old 1970′s slalom boat that had been sat unused at the side of our house for the previous couple of decades. Fifteen years or so on, it was great fun to be back to my roots and using it once again as my training venue for a week. With a couple of poles hung from the same bridge I used it to keep my training going whilst Lee Valley was shut, doing various physical and technical sessions, with my girlfriend, Becky, on hand to video and some coaching from my brother, Fraser. Despite gale force winds in Scotland, training was still good as the Water of Leith is well sheltered from the wind down in a steep little valley.

It’s hard to believe how mild this December has been for training considering that last winter it was down as low as minus 10 degrees and there was thick ice on the banks and poles of the training site in Nottingham. Hopefully the weather can stay relatively kind to us for a couple more weeks before Richard, Mark and I head off to Australia for a few weeks of warm weather training.

2011 came to an end very quickly and it’s very exciting to now be in the Olympic year. 2012 has arrived. Happy New Year all!

New Training Video

A few weeks ago Laurence Griffiths from Getty Images came to spend the day with me, filming me train at the Lee Valley White Water Centre. Here’s the video he made:

 

 

Final Race Weekend of the Year

This weekend was the final race weekend of the year. I was in hard training up to the race, but still wanted to win and it was a good challenge to go back to race on Nottingham where I hadn’t canoed yet this year since the move to the Olympic white water course. There was a race each day with the British Open Premier race on the Saturday and the British Open Championship Finals on the Sunday. With the toughest competition arguably being in C2 (Baillie/Stott having won World Cup and European Championship medals) we were delighted to take the double win. In C1 I won the Saturdays race, but didn’t hold my final run together on the Sunday and had to settle for three wins and one second place. I went there to try to win all the races so I was, of course, disappointed. However, in the race where I finished second, I had put down a semi-final run which was faster than anyone managed in the final by some margin, which was some consolation. You have to do it in the final when it counts though!

At the race Richard and I, along with the other two crews of Baillie/Stott and Davies/Lister were also presented with the International Teams Award for our Team Medal at the World Championships. The award is a rather impressive sword!

 

Three Classes – One Coach

One of the challenges that Richard and I have faced over the last year has been the coaching situation. Currently on the canoe slalom programme we have a class coaching system, meaning that there is a separate coach responsible for the athletes who compete in each class, K1, C1 and C2. With Richard having a coach, Shaun Pearce, for his K1, me having Mark Delaney in C1 and Nick Smith working with Richard and I in C2, the logistics of organising our weekly and overall training plan to fit sessions in with three different coaches has been very difficult for us and for our coaches, especially as each of our coaches also have other athletes to work around too. It has also been difficult without any one coach overseeing our training and progress as a whole. Though each class we compete in has it’s own technical development requirements, there are also many aspects of our training and competition which are all interlinked and it would be much better logistically to have one coach overseeing Richard and I in K1, C1 and C2.

Because of this, Richard and I decided to ask our performance director and head coach if they would consider letting us work with Mark Delaney across the three classes, as he is the only one of our coaches with high level experience of coaching K1, C1 and C2. It was a very difficult decision as we have worked so well together with Nick and Shaun for some great results over the last few years and it’s tough to leave a coach without it seeming personal. We are incredibly grateful for all that they have helped us achieve so far, but the time has come to move to working with one coach. It’s purely a logistical and performance decision and I’m confident it is the right decision for everyone involved.

Scottish Champion

I really enjoyed heading back up to Scotland for a few days  for the Scottish Championships in Grandtully. It’s always a good fun event with all the paddlers competing also helping to run the race and a ceilidh in the evening afterwards. Now that I rarely train in Scotland it’s great to go back to paddle where I started out and it was amazing to see all the youngsters coming through in the sport back home.

The race itself was tough and I was very glad to win the title back having finished second last year. My main rival in scotland, Adam Marshall, is very fast, particularly on Grandtully, and he put up a good fight. It was a close competition, but fortunately I came out on top.

Credit: Rob Eyton-Jones

World Championships

I’ve just got back to the UK after this year’s World Championships in Slovakia. The race schedule didn’t quite go to plan with very strong wind causing the organisers to have to cancel the race for the first two days despite having already run first runs of C2 and K1 women.  They cancelled the results of the first runs of heats and managed to restart the competition on Friday two days behind time. In C2 Richard and I put in a good solid run in the final, but narrowly missed out on the medals by 0.47 seconds. To be fair, we had been pleased with our performance and though we would have preferred a medal, fourth at the World Championships was still a great result.

In the C1 semi-final I made a big time error at the top of the course and despite fighting really hard to put down a good run on the rest of the course it wasn’t enough to recover my time error and I finished fourteenth. I was pleased to have held my composure so well after my big mistake to complete the remainder of the run well and, to be honest, was surprised to have come so close to making the final with my time loss as I ended up only 0.87 seconds off tenth place. It was too big an error to make, however, and that was my Worlds over in C1. It was an exciting race with current reigning double World Champion Tony Estanguet also missing the final in 13th place and Michal Martikan failing to get into the medals for the first time since his first medal in 1995! The gold went to frenchman Denis Gargaud Chanut.

There was some consolation in the C2 team event where we put in a fantastic run to take the World Championships bronze medal. A great success for a team which were certainly not expected to finish in the medals.

Despite the disappointment of not quite getting the results I’d known I was capable of at the Worlds, the season has as a whole been a successful one. I’ve competed in five major races this year, the European Championships, two World Cups, the Olympic test event and World Championships. And to have won a Gold medal, two Bronze medals, three fourth places and have made four out of five finals in both C1 and C2 has been a definite step up from last year. I’ll be taking a bit of down time for the next few weeks to plan for the training and build up into next season and am looking forward to getting into some hard winter training.

 

 

Doubled up on Medals!

After a successful day yesterday to take a podium place in C1, there was no time to celebrate as I still had the C2 race to go today. The course set was very tough for C2s with tough downstream gate combinations all the way down the course. Having qualified through to the semi-final in fourth place on Friday, Richard and I were paddling well and we put in a solid performance in the semi-final. The racing was very tight with third place down to seventh place only separated by 0.51 of a second. We were tied on exactly the same time with the top Czech crew in third place and safely through to the final. Having had a good run, we knew there wasn’t much to change about our approach to the final run, but that we just needed to execute our plan a little better in a few places. With a great crowd, the sun shinning and the usual very exciting commentary blaring at you on the water I really enjoyed racing the final and Richard and I put in a great run. We were over a second improved on our semi-final run and took third place – the bronze medal! We were very happy to have put in a strong performance and I was delighted to be on the podium for the second time in the weekend. Doubling up in C1 and C2 can be tough at times, but it’s great when it goes well and doubling up on medals at the World Cup in Prague was very rewarding.

Race Bib Presentation with The Mayor of Prague

Medal In Prague

Today I was delighted to pick up a medal in the C1 at the World Cup final here in Prague. I had qualified well in 5th place despite picking up a two second penalty on both runs yesterday. In the semi-final I had a solid run to progress to the final in third place and then had a great run in the final on the top half of the course and only some small errors on the bottom section of the course. Fortunately, with the very tight racing here this weekend, the run was good enough for third place and I was really happy to be on the podium again for my eighth World Cup medal in C1.

Medal in Prague