Part 1- Sentiments of Stuart McIntosh and Chris Wiegand

Each sport has it's descriptors scewed up by people not familiar with them. These descriptors can often frustrate the athlete being introduced. Road rage happens after being shoved off the road by careless or aggressive drivers shoving them into other lanes or forced to slam on their brakes just One Last Time. For struggling athletes trying to make their life bread in sport, they can only take so many labels as to what sport they do. After a while they just pop, similar to a baloon rubbed too many times on the screaming 8 year-old head.

Some such descriptor abuse is as follows:

Professional Table Tennis is called "Ping-Pong", Track and Field Athletes are called "joggers" and they put on their "tennis shoes", water polo athletes are called "swimmers" or god forbid even confused as synconized swimmers with a ball. Team Handball players being confused with basketball or even worse Ping Pong.

Now in regard to the sport of whitewater canoeing or kayaking, I would like to take this opportunity to make the following statement - It is not ROWING, it’s CANOEING!! I can remember countless times when good friends or family introduced me to their friends as “This is Stuart McIntosh, he rowed in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney!”

Rowing is a sport for very tall people who sit in a very long thin boat and row as fast as they can in the opposite direction to the way they are facing.

Slalom CANOEISTS and KAYAKERS face in the direction they are going, negotiating white water rivers, paddling as fast as they can because, if they don’t, they could cause serious injury to themselves.

Canoeing/Kayaking is a sport full of people that live and thrive on adrenalin. Rowing is a sport full of very tall people that enjoy walking around in public wearing Lycra!

The Ultimate Test of Skill

‘’Speed, Strength and Mental Toughness is crucial for the elite Slalom Canoeist or Kayaker, as they precisely navigate their way through a series of ‘gates’ put in place to challenge the skills of the competitor. Time taken to paddle from start to finish including penalties give the competitor their total time.’’

                     Part 2  - Slalom Racing is:

Slalom is intended to test white water skills in a safe environment. The object of the sport is to negotiate a pre-defined course set by the course designer. The winner of the event will have negotiated all the ‘gates’ in the fastest time, preferably without getting time penalties, which are given for hitting and missing gates.

A Slalom race is held over a section of river approximately 400m long. The 18-25 ‘gates’ are set in position creating a ‘course’ down the river.

A"gate" is two poles suspended over the water. Red and white striped gates must be negotiated upstream. Green and white striped gates are negotiated in a downstream direction.

If a competitor touches a gate they are penalised with 2 seconds added to their time. Missing a gate adds 50 seconds. Each competitor takes two runs, and the times are added together.

The Canoe Slalom Course

When a ‘course’ is set, at least six of the gates must require a paddler to paddle upstream, the remaining gates can be oriented downstream. Slalom racers are not permitted to practice on the race course. The first time they face the conditions and layout of the gates is during competition. Another way of putting this is that the competitors are allowed to paddle on the river as many times as they want in the days leading to the race, using training gates placed in any positions they desire on the river. But the day before the race, the river is closed and all training gates taken away. The course designer will then arrive with a team of helpers and instruct them as to which positions on the river he wants each individual gate. When he is happy all the gates are in the correct places he specified, the course is then set for the race. It is the canoeist’s job to then look at the course and work out how he/she will try to get through all the gates in the fastest possible total time and win the race. At major international races, it is common to see canoeists training on the section of river the race will be held, months prior to the event.

Canoe Slalom Classes

Four classes compete in a Slalom race: Men’s and Ladies’ Kayak, Canadian Singles and Canadian Doubles.

There are some basic differences between canoes and kayaks. The canoe paddler kneels in the canoe and uses a single bladed paddle, as seen in the pictures above. The kayaker is sitting in the canoe, with his or her legs stretched out in front and equipped with a double bladed paddle.

Canoe Slalom & Recreational Canoeing

There is a difference between Slalom canoeists and recreational canoeists. Slalom canoes, unlike regular canoes, are decked. This means a spray skirt covers the hole that the canoeist uses to get in and out of the boat, keeping water out of the boat. Also, the Slalom canoes and kayaks are standard 4 meters long (Canadian Doubles’ boats are slightly longer). A Slalom canoe is very strong and very light at 9kg, made from Carbon or Kevlar fibres and Epoxy Resin. Recreational canoeists generally paddle in canoes made of plastic, which are very heavy.

THE HISTORY
OF CANOE SLALOM

Canoe Slalom started on white water on September 11th, 1932 in Switzerland, where the inventor of this discipline proclaimed, "Slalom is a white water test." The idea came from skiing, where terms like "winter, snow and ski slalom" modified into "summer, water and Canoe Slalom".

The origins of Canoe Slalom were on flat water, but soon after switched to the white water rapids of natural rivers.

Six years after the first Slalom competition in Switzerland, World War II began and the development of Slalom halted, while flat water racing (sprint) grew. This imbalance between flat water and Slalom was evident when flat water became an Olympic sport. Today, it is possible to say that both Olympic disciplines of the ICF (International Canoe Federation) are treated equally.

The first World Championships in Slalom under the International Canoe Federation was organised in 1949 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Between 1950 –1970, Canoe Slalom underwent dramatic changes. Folding and rigid canvas canoes were replaced by fibreglass, reinforced plastic boats for top-level athletes at championship events.

The 1970s brought dramatic changes in boat construction. The C2 position of the crew went into the middle and the C1 width was changed to 70 cm. But this period also signifies the time when Canoe Slalom was taken out of the Olympic Games in 1972.

In 1992, Canoe Slalom was re-entered as an Olympic Sport at the Olympic Games in Barcelona. This also started the period when major championships started to take place on artificial rivers, purpose built for the sport. Over the last 12 years, we have seen a number of artificial sites pop up around the world. And for the first time, at the 2004 Athens Olympics, Canoe Slalom will be a true stadium event, sharing a massive Olympic venue with Cycling, Baseball and three other Olympic sports.

In the past 76 years, we have moved from canvas canoes on natural rivers to high-tech carbon fibre canoes raced on purpose built rivers, where the water is pumped back to the start, creating at stadium sport. Although the sport is still amateur, could the next big change be towards professionalism, similar to the NBA?

Thanks to Stuart Mcintosh of the UK Olympic Team for breaking down our sport.