Tim Brabants retires from international competition

This entry should have been devoted to the Nottingham British National Regatta, which officially started the sprint calendar in the islands to select the international team that will represent GB in the European and World Championships. Nothing out of the ordinary, with K1 200 Men for favorite McKeever, while Rachel Cawthorn won the Women 200 and Jonathan Boyton (in the absence of Paul Wycherley for a shoulder injury) was the one this time disputed the 1,000 to Tim Brabants, relegating him to the silver medal.

If you have the holy patience to go looking at the results of the 300 races, here it is the resulting pdf madness.

However, on Monday some breaking news eclipsed everything else when Tim Brabants announced its retirement from the high level competition. Despite having met the criteria to join the national team this year, Brabants took the difficult decision at the prospect that reached his age (36 years old) he has passed his best moment and is unlikely to improve his level, so he doesn't want to close doors to new paddlers who will now have the opportunity to get experienced in the national team and be eligible in the future to achieve the success he has already achieved.

Brabants will now practice his profession, doctor, where he hopes to get specialized in emergency care.

Charles Evans: forgotten biography of a late ‘60s Marathon paddler

In collaboration with Sportscene

Nick Harding | London - From time to time a legend may be unintentionally forgotten if they lead a humble existence out of the lime-light post-paddling career or if their successes were not documented.
 

Charles Evans at the Liffey Descent (IRL), in the mid '60s

SPORTSCENE would like to pay tribute to such a hallmark name of '60s paddling resulting from a request from his family to celebrate a decade of incredible achievement.
Dr Charles Evans was a World Champion long-distance paddler and member of the Royal Canoe Club. A modest Briton, he currently lives in Cornwall and has no idea about this article! His illustrious career spanned 7 years, 1963-1970, representing Britain. Highlights, below, included winning 8 National Championships.

1965 – * National Champion: Spain
1966 – * National Champion: Spain
1968 – * National Champion: Britain, Spain * Captain: British team
1969 – * National Champion: Britain, Spain * Captain: British team
1970 – * National Champion: Britain, Denmark * Captain: British team

His reputation took off in Spain, his dominance came from winning one race the most, the Sella, where he took three K1 victories. Below is the featured piece of news at the ABC Newspaper at that time.

The Devizes to Westminster race, out of the IFC World Series for 2013

A few days ago, talking about the results of the 2012 World Series Marathon, we made a first approach to what, from our point of view, it's maybe not the best organization by the ICF. Introduced in the 2010 season, the world series formed by 10 long distance classic races is not taking off among the international elite.
Then, some days ago, the ICF wrote to the Royal Canoe Club of London's about their decision of not to include by fourth consecutive year the Devizes to Westminster race in the series. According to the letter, signed by Tim Cornish, a permanent member of the ICF Marathon, the race is "too hard", which makes few international paddlers be attracted by it.
The Royal Canoe Club, organizer of the event and world's oldest canoeing club, has communicated its strong disagreement with the decision, despite being willing to pay the fee of 600 euros payable to the ICF. This was one of the points that we discussed in the previous article and, frankly, does not seem excessive royalties and an not a big amount to attract international paddlers if that money was used to finance their trips, as proposed. Still, the fact that the Royal Canoe Club had no trouble to pay the fee indicates that the decision does respond properly to a change of course (or at least a "rethought") to these international series.
But are they taking steps in the right direction? Certainly it won't be me the one who puts into question the reasons of a committee with so experienced members as Jørn Cronberg, Alan Laws, Ruud Hejselaar or Tim Cornish himself (winner in his youth of many of these important races) . But it is also true that many decisions have been controversial over the years. This time, the fact of rejecting a race for being too hard (200 km. in 4 stages for the K1s) can be seen in two ways:

Glenn Eldridge wins a challenging Icon Classic of Surfski

One week ago it was held at the British coast the Icon Classic of surfski. Usually conceived as a 16 km. downwind race from Morte Point to Combe Martin, this time the bad weather conditions that have been on the British Islands during the beginning of the summer forced the organization to make a big change on the race course. 7 metres waves at Morte Point definitely were not safe for padlers, so it was decided then to make a round course with start and finish at Combe Martin.That meant an 8 km. upwind fighting agiants waves of "just" 3 or 4 metres, then U turn and another 8 km. downwind back to the finish line.

About 50 braves took the start, with a high level field including former Marathon World Champion Ivan Lawler, Simon Dark or current National Team members, case of Ben Farrell, for instance. After one hour and sicten minutes of epic paddling, victory was claimed by Glenn Eldridge, who got a few seconds advantage over Ben Farrel. Two minutes later, the third position came to Portuguese from Setúbal Luis Ventura, who left behind the Spanish specialist José Antonio Girón and th race chairman Mark Ressel, fourth and fifth overall. Jenna Ferris was the first lady, leaving behind the former winner Chloe Bunnett.

Winter panorama in England: the Waterside Series

As Elite Kayak is a Spanish based web, we use to think that everything everywhere works the same way we do it here. But as soon as you open your eyes to other countries, the landscape is much more different from what you thought. It's usual to hear from friends who have gone to the Ardèche in France, or down to South Africa, the sentence "that's something different, man". Not only racing, but managing too.

I wouldn't like to go very deep today about this matter (hope to be able to in future posts), but we can already talk today about England, where there's a growing passion for Marathon, even though it already was the country where we could say that "officialy" started the huge growth of this discipline over the last 25 years (they held in 1988 the first official ICF Marathon World Championships, at Nottingham). The parallel competition panorama is not small at all and every weekend there's a frenzy activity with races all around the country,many of them under the MRC (Marathon Races Commitee), an organization ruled by the clubs and paddlers themselves.


A good example are the Waterside Series, four Marathon races that in the cold winter kick off the season. Held along the country channels, where the level dams mark the portages. The distances are also not a joke, with races that could surpass the 30 miles. This tough racing conditions make this competitions only appropiate for paddlers from level 1 to 3, as indicated in the British ranking lists (they go up to level 9) depending on results and performance.