They plunged down a 45-degree ramp and three metres into the maelstrom below, battling the elements and grappling Gladiators-style with their rivals. Through the foamy bedlam there was to be no gold medal for Great Britain with Joe Clarke and Kimberley Woods emerging with silver and bronze respectively, but kayak cross is surely here to stay after arriving at the Olympics with a resounding splash.
“We’re just getting started here, aren’t we?” said Clarke, who had been favoured to win the men’s final but trailed the New Zealander Finn Butcher throughout that minute or so of fight and froth. The 2016 slalom gold winner, who finished fifth in that event this year, is back at the top and voiced few regrets. After the medal ceremony he lifted his young son, Hugo, aloft and told everyone who would listen of his desire for this discipline to push kayaking into the wider consciousness.
Judging by its reception at the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium, it is well on the way. Disneyland Paris is only 20 min up the road but this is no Mickey Mouse show: in each race four paddlers compete to negotiate eight buoys along the course, performing an eskimo roll between the first and second for good measure, while contact between rivals’ paddles and boats is an essential component. It is how a sodden, turbulent 100m athletics final might look if athletes were permitted to shoulder-charge one another aside.
The latter facility was a big reason behind Woods’s third-placed finish, her second of the summer, which similarly fell a shade below expectations but was still received with nothing but grace. Woods had been caught in a tangle at the second buoy with the local hope Angèle Hug, who finished second behind the Australian Noemie Fox. Towards the end she looked poised for a comfortable silver but went for broke, attempting to barrel Fox aside but failing. It left her in last position but a penalty to the German Elena Lilik upgraded her to the podium. What daring, devilish, dramatic fun it had been.
“I thought: ‘I’m in the Olympic final guys, I’m going to go for gold,’” Woods said. “A really brave moment but it didn’t pay off.” Regardless of the outcome it was the kind of unflinching move that has been ironed out from plenty of elite sports. Kayak cross was given its debut in part as an effort to appeal to the TikTok generation: its short, sharp injections of thrills and spills certainly appear capable of doing that.
The psychological, tactical element plays a huge role too as competitors look along that line before being hurled into the water. “We watched all the rounds of the other people and we’re saying: ‘Who’s going straight, who’s going right and who’s going left?’ and trying to position ourselves on the ramp to combat those situations,” Clarke said. In the event he received a nudge from his starting neighbour Noah Hegge that set the plan off course and Butcher was able to gain a decisive early lead.
There is significant momentum to carry into Los Angeles although teething problems exist, too. Another Briton, Mallory Franklin, exited at the quarter-final stage after being penalised for missing a roll. The 360 degree underwater manoeuvre takes them under a raised bar and has to be performed in full within a specific zone.
“I presume I rolled late because I got faulted on it,” she said. “It’s one of those things where the discipline’s quite new, they’re still developing the rules and there were chats going on literally in the heats stage about what a roll was or wasn’t. It’s a little bit of a shame. Although I think it’s a really good discipline, maybe it has been put in a little bit early.”
Franklin, avowedly a pure slalom specialist, was not looking for excuses and admitted she lacks the “fighty” personality traits of Clarke and Woods. Technical brilliance meets bare-knuckle waterspouts brutality here: it is unforgiving but an added degree of regulation may well be required as its profile soars.
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The hope is that Great Britain, ahead of the game in producing a batch of top-level performers thanks to the national lottery-funded ramp completed at Lee Valley white water centre last year, can take the next step in four years. The pioneers of 2024 have, for all the absence of a gold, blazed a joyously madcap trail.
“The slalom was an absolute spectacle, I know it was a big hit back home,” said Clarke, who confirmed he plans to resurface for another Olympics. “And this is going to be bigger again.”