Hank K1 World Champion while we get a DNF…

I very impressive race on Saturday saw Hank McGregor win the mens K1 world title. Shaun Rubenstein raced a great race to come in 4th, very close behind. Today Mike Mbanjwa and Eric Zondi had a brilliant K2 race to finish 10th in the World!

This morning saw the racing of the mens K2 marathon where Graeme Solomon and I got to test ourselves. With the extreme heat and humidity the plan was to stay out of the ‘red’ zone as much as possible. Wise words from Shaun Ruby advised us not to let our heart rates get too high early on as it will a struggle to get them back down in the heat. After watching the K1 race the day before we saw how the guys were struggling in the last few laps.
After a decent start we were comfortably on the back of the front bunch of about 7 boats just trying to stay out of trouble. When there were some hard burns towards the end of the 1st lap we decided not to kill ourselves to stay with the group as we would under normal circumstances. We kept calm and controlled, settling into a 2nd group of 4 boats sitting not too far behind the front group watching them as they jostled for positions. At the 2nd portage we were 24sec off the leaders when we saw one of the top Spanish crews in the front swerve off the course with a broken rudder. The Hungarian boat dropped off the front leaving only 3 boats on the front group. Our chasing group then shuffled into a new group of 4, things were looking great.
Our bunch started to get pretty close to the leaders but we decided it was not ideal just yet to catch the leaders as it would result in a bunch of 7 boats too early on. We would keep calm and slowly over the course of the race work our way up to the leaders hoping for some of the other boats in our group to tire slightly so as to pose less of a threat at the end. Just before the 3rd portage I noticed the rudder was not working too well so asked Graeme to take a look at it at the put-in of the 3rd portage. After a quick look he said it was fine and we pushed on. A kilometer and a half later after we rounded one of the turns and then needed to straighten out again the boat just kept turning, way off track… I had no control of the rudder yet again! Can you believe it! 2 years in a row the same problem!! Unheard of!!!
Just at the point were all was setting up perfectly, we were both still feeling so fresh, saving our bodies for the second half of the race. We paddled to the bank got out and could not find the cause of the steering problem… We tried once more to get going again but I could not control the boat no matter how hard I tried… We went to the bank again, this time we opened the rudder cap at the back and looked inside the boat, the steering system had once again pulled off the sides of the boat leaving the rudder useless. With no way to even continue as the boat could not even go in a straight line… We were sadly forced to withdraw… Heart breaking stuff as my whole reason for training so hard and coming back to worlds this year was to make up for our misfortune of last years worlds…

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