This morning I did a gym session before heading down to the river. Oppressive heat has returned to Memphis and the Mid South, and the temperature was pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit when I got downtown. Once again I spent 30 minutes in the surfski and 30 minutes in the whitewater boat. There was a robust south breeze that kept me cool as I paddled the ski down to the mouth of the harbor, but when I came back toward the dock with the wind at my back the heat bore down. I also had bad stinging in my eyes: with the wind at my back the sweat on my face doesn't evaporate before it runs into my eyes. Back at the dock I hopped in the whitewater boat and did all kinds of drills, including plenty of Eskimo rolls. The water felt great out in that heat. I took a cool hose bath once I'd finished, and came home feeling pretty good. I'm enjoying these variety-filled paddling sessions.
At the Olympic Games over there in Paris, the whitewater slalom men's canoe class had its semifinal and final on Monday. French paddler Nicolas Gestin won the gold medal, and whereas Jessica Fox had saved her best run for last in women's kayak, Gestin posted the fastest times in the preliminary round, the semifinal, and the final. His final run was a remarkable 5.48 seconds faster than that of silver medalist Adam Burgess of Great Britain. Matej Benus of Slovakia claimed the bronze, 0.19 second behind Burgess.
NBC was so kind as to post this footage on You Tube of the final runs for Burgess and Gestin, and Gestin's run is truly a thing of beauty. It reminds me of moments I had while racing slalom (not at the world class level, of course) when it felt like everything was going right, like all the skills I knew I had were right at my fingertips. I've had similar moments in downwind paddling more than two decades later. Such moments are elusive, but when you have them it makes all the many hours of work you put in feel worthwhile.
The Olympics came to an end in the rudest of ways for U.S. C1 paddler Casey Eichfeld, for whom I shared some backstory in this post three months ago. He received a 50-second penalty for missing a gate that knocked him back to last place in the semifinal round. As of this writing I have not seen video footage of Casey's run, but I would guess that the penalty resulted from a blink-of-an-eye error that Casey is now wishing he could have back.
That is very much the nature of this supremely unforgiving paddlesport discipline. A major league baseball player can make a fielding error, or an N.B.A. basketball player can commit a turnover, and there are still chances for their teams to come back and win. When you make a similar mistake in elite-level whitewater slalom, that's it. You lose. This is almost certainly Casey's last Olympics and I'm really sorry it had to end in such a way. Over his long career Casey has been a lot of fun to watch and has been an exemplary citizen in the international athletic community, and I hope that in the fullness of time he'll be able to look back on all that and be satisfied.
The action in Paris has now moved on to the other two classes. In today's preliminary round, the women's canoe field got trimmed from 21 athletes to 18 and the men's kayak field from 23 to 20. Among the 16 female canoeists who will line up in tomorrow's semifinal is Evy Leibfarth of Bryson City, North Carolina, who finished 11th today. The male kayakers will have their semis and finals Thursday. The U.S. did not qualify to enter an athlete in that class for these Games.
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