Nathan Luce, General Manager of Performance, provides his World Championship reflections after a thrilling five days of racing in Canada.
Despite the challenges that COVID-19 has presented throughout the World Championships campaign, our team persevered and came home with some memorable performances.
There are many highlights to recognise from a performance perspective such as our team qualifying for seven A-Finals and coming home with 3 medals.
Lisa Carrington never ceases to impress with her dominant double gold medal performances in both the K1 200m and 500m. These results came despite some challenging headwind conditions for the entire week.
While the team are tracking towards qualifying our key boats for both the Women’s and Paracanoe squads, there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done before next year’s World Championships.
I am extremely proud to see the willingness of our athletes and staff to work together as one team, which had a positive impact on our results.
Our three Paracanoe athletes had an outstanding regatta qualifying for all three of their A-Finals. Seeing Scott Martlew back on the podium after a hard-fought bronze was another highlight of the week, while Corbin Hart and Peter Cowan came away with promising results in their first A-Finals. Corbin was not intimidated by the experienced field and fought for the podium right until the finish line.
Watching our women’s crews come so close to podium performances in both the K2 and K4 was bittersweet.
It is difficult to be a few fractions of a second from two more medals, but the performances make for an exciting prospect for our campaign to Paris, knowing that we have new athletes who should continue to improve over the next two years. Hopefully, this race experience will fuel their training motivation for the next year leading into Duisburg.
The men’s team came in with high expectations after some promising World Cup results, but a challenging training block after the majority of the team contracted COVID-19, along with a deep field has shown us that we still have some work to do leading into next year’s Olympic qualifying regatta in Duisburg.
Results
Women K1 200m and 500m | Lisa Carrington – Gold
Men KL2 200m | Scott Martlew – Bronze
Men KL3 200m | Corbin Hart – 5th in A-Final
Men VL3 200m | Peter Cowan – 8th in A-Final
Women K2 500m | Lisa Carrington, Alicia Hoskin – 4th in A-Final
Women K4 500m | Olivia Brett, Lisa Carrington, Alicia Hoskin, Tara Vaughan – 5th in A-Final
Men K2 500m | Max Brown and Kurtis Imrie – 9th in B-Final
Men K4 500m | Ben Duffy, Zach Ferkins, Hamish Legarth, James Munro – 8th in B-Final
Men K1 200m | Ashton Reiser – 4th in B-Final
Men K1 500m | Ashton Reiser – 3rd in C-Final
Men K1 1000m | James Munro – 9th in B -Final
Men K1 5000m | James Munro – 16th
