Ant Stott's Weblog

Below: 18yrs old, first Dusi as a senior.

I started paddling just after my13th birthday in 1991 while in standard six at Maritzburg College. By the end of that year I acquired my first canoe and the bug had bitten sending me off into the start of my exciting new paddling career.

I started off just doing the local inter-schools races in the U14 age group and kept on playing rugby through the winter followed by athletics. Any spare day I could find I would go down to the river to go canoeing.

My first paddle was a paddle-ski paddle about 1metre70 in length when in fact I should have been using a paddle of about 2meters14. Some of the matrics started to notice that I might have a bit of potential and one of them (Rob Warr) lent me a set of his flat blade canoe paddles. It wasn’t long before I started to put a lot of effort into my training and as a result began to reap the benefits.

Being the youngest and close to one of the smallest people in my standard always made it hard for me to do well in other sports. Coming from Winterton Primary which had 150 scholars from class 1 to standard 5, English and Afrikaans, to College with its over 1000 was a fairly large step. Before I had played 1^st team rugby from standard 2, now I was battling to make the under 13E side! Suddenly I had found a sport that I was good at, not just beating the boys in my age group but actually giving the guys who where a lot older than me a good run for their money too.

My older brother Steve started to paddle at more or less the same time as me and we decided to team up for the 1993 Dusi. At 14 I was the youngest competitor in the race paddling off into the unknown in the front of the boat with my 16-year-old brother sitting behind me. We did pretty well considering our age and inexperience to finish 315th.

The following year we where a bit bigger and took on the 1994 K2 Dusi with a bit more seriousness. This time finishing 66^th overall and 2^nd in the U18’s. At 16 I entered my first k1 Dusi, inexperience shone through yet again and I got lost on the notorious Burma Road portage on the 3^rd day while following another paddler. However I still managed a 37^th and won the U18 section convincingly. 1996 was a K2 year again and I teamed up with a fellow junior paddler Jason Calister, we had a solid race finishing 21^st overall and winning the u18’s.

As a junior paddler I made my first national team in 1995 where I was fortunate enough to travel to Japan to compete in the World Junior sprint championships where both my 1000m k4 and 500m k2 achieved a 15^th place. In 1996 I was selected for the junior national sprint team, which toured and competed in Holland, Germany, France and Belgium. We got some good results and ended up bringing a number of medals home. I was also selected for the marathon side that year which competed at the Junior Worlds in Sweden. In the K2 we attained a credible 5^th position.

Below: Inter-house atheletics at Maritzburg College