I am stunned

I am in disbelief.

Adam van Koeverden had a disastrous final race in the K1 1000m last night. At the 250m mark, I thought that he looked a little tight, that his strokes were not as powerful as I’ve seen in his semi-final races. But I figured that it’s the 1000m race, not the 500m race, so it just must be a different stroke rate or race plan or something. Then in the last 200m, everything just unravelled. AVK started to fade, and fade, and fade. He finished 8th out of 9 paddlers. What a disaster. What a shocker.

I sat in silence, with my mouth hanging open. I’m a paddler. I’ve had races where I believed going in that I’m going to kick ass and then during the race I feel my body betraying me because it has tightened up and it’s not doing what I want it to do, and my mind starts to wonder WTF is going on. And after the finish line, I scratch my head and can only guess at what went wrong with me.

But I’m a recreational paddler. More competitive than most rec paddlers, but rec nonetheless. And I just never thought I would see a world-class paddler like AVK have a meltdown like that. Paddlers like me, sure, but not them. Not him.

Paddling has a lot to do with feel. Coaches always say feel the water, feel your pull, feel the blade. But when you tighten up, you lose that feel very quickly and you end up not paddling very well. AVK has the 500m finals tonight. Except for the race yesterday, he’s been paddling well all week. I’m praying that he gets it together for the 500m, that he’ll have a fantastic race. Go, Adam!