Worlds Round Up

After an awesome surf on Wednesday night on a greening buseater, the water level dropped gradually throughout the remainder of the competition. The hole started to get a bit bigger, which did make the wave more retentive, but also made it a bit harder to get the huge bounces that were really easy to do on the greener wave. We were lucky to still have water by the end of the men's finals, and straight after the water dropped significantly and turned into a big pit!

Andrew Holcombe went big on the green wave in prelims.

I was up on Thursday and did not seem to have the wave wired at all, not really surprising after just 6 rides in practice. There seemed to be a fine line between flushing off on playboater's right and getting hammered on the left, I managed to do all of these in my 4 rides - one of which resulted in a few seconds of downtime and an underwater 'Harry Potter' sequence where I only just managed to hold onto my paddle with one hand - a very powerful wave. However, in between times I managed to get a few left and right blunts which was enough to take 3rd place and move through to the semis.

Friday was semis and finals day. Just 3 Brits made it through to finals (Flic - Junior ladies; Lynsey Evans and myself - ladies). Ed Smith and Dicky Chrimes both paddled really well in the men's semis and Ed narrowly missed out on a finals place by 0.33 points.

The ladies semis started with 10 and was cut to 5. We had 2 rides, best ride counted. Ruth Gordon threw down some huge backblunts and nice cleant blunts which gave her a huge 50 point score. Tanya Faux got a couple of big pan ams to put her in 2nd place. The fear of flushing got to me once more as I stayed safe with lefty blunts. This was once again enough to put me into 3rd place. The finals were in the afternoon and we had 3 rides, meaning 2 throw away rides - good job as my first 2 rides did not really happen. I managed to pull it out of the bag on the last ride, and despite still not really feeling comfortable on the wave to go for back blunts or pan ams, I got some left air blunts and right blunts, and just managed to avoid a beat down on left side of the wave. This was just enough to creep in front of fellow brit Lynsey Evans into bronze medal position. Lynsey put in a solid first ride, but dissapoint for her as she once again (as happened in Oz) just missed out on a medal posititon.

So, another bronze medal for me, and this time a lone Brit float-boat medalist. A different colour would have been nice for a change, but on that wave this week I was never really in contention against Tanya Faux or Ruth. And from my first few rides of the week, and the first 2 rides in finals I didn't think I'd make the cut at all (good job it wasn't knockouts this time!) so I was very happy to get on the podium. I'm looking forward to going back to bussy at somepoint though to throw down some big moves.

A close men's final, but EJ came out on top again.

Some big clean back pan-ams and pistol flips put him just a few points ahead of 2nd place Peter Csonka.

Other results are on www.worldfreestylekayakingchampionships.com, or www.ukfreestyle.com

Hopefully I'll get some pictures of me on here soon, but need to find people who took them! Just back to England briefly as I'm off to Slovenia tomorrow - you can never have enough holidays :)