Rapid Descent Racing's Dan Hall has re-written his own record books and taken the silver medal in World Cup 5 (sprint) at Irvea, Italy!!This is Australia's first Wildwater medal at senior level, only Australia's second medal in total after Andrew Tribe won Junior gold many years ago.
The Irvea course claimed some big names, with Mruzek, Marek, Slepica (CZE), Andrea (ITA) and Stiefenhoffer (GER) all well down the list compared to their results from earlier sprint World Cups this season.
Dan has been training and competing at the top level on a shoe-string budget every year since his first European campaign in 2003. Wildwater kayaking has not received national funding since 2004. Dan was elated that his commitment and hard work has yielded such a big result:
"Wahoooooo!!!!!! Silver medal at World Cup race 5!!!! Wahoooooo!!!!!! I'm so stoked! It was the toughest course I have raced on in my Wildwater kayak. The course was like Brady's on steroids but harder! I had 2 crackers and came from 4th to 2nd!!! I was only .7 of a sec off winning. One more race tomorrow and then back to Scotland."
News just in - Dan 11th in World Cup 6 (classic). A solid classic from Dan. From the six World Cup races, Dan has results of 2nd, 8th, 10th, 11th, 14th, and 15th. The best four of these count for overall World Cup ranking, so Dan should have a good chance of improving on his World Cup ranking of 7th in 2006. Rankings will be available soon on the ICF Wildwater site http://www.wwcommittee.com/
See some awesome video footage of the sprint race courtesy of the CUS Milano Wildwater Team:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vEbMQPQwEvo
Sprint Results: http://www.ivrea2008.it/doc/sprint.pdf
Classic Results: http://www.ivrea2008.it/doc/classic.pdfOther links - Official race site: http://www.ivrea2008.it/
One of the USA C1's, Tom Weir, has been keeping an online journal during the Wildwater World Cup series. Here's his journal http://tomwier.livejournal.com/
Here's an extract from Tom's journal:
"The classic course at Ivrea is flat. It takes me around 11 minutes to get from the start to the bridge where the whitewater starts, and my deck stays dry the entire time. Then, there are a few waves and huge boils under a bridge in town, and you drop into the sprint course.The sprint course is as follows:
Sprint across a flat but boily pool. Go over a slide into a small hole, and run the waves into a ledge drop. Run the drop on the left of the hole.
Go across a short flat, then run 5 waves, and then run 6 ledges in a row. They range in height from 3 to 5 feet, and the holes\ waves at the bottom are very powerful and pushy.
Many people are swimming...many are eddying out. There are a few who have been seriously injured on the concrete ledges as they flip and pinball from side to side. It is a wild rapid. "
Check out more video footage at http://c2momotdidier.canalblog.com/
This is a blog maintained by one of the French C2 crews.
