Loving the Olympics and hating them, too

Yesterday was the final day of the Olympic flatwater sprint regatta at Vaires-sur-Marne on the east side of Paris.  Men won medals in the 1000-meter single kayak event, and women raced finals in 500-meter single kayak and 200-meter single canoe.

Lisa Carrington of New Zealand cemented her status as one of the greatest sprint kayakers ever with her win in 500-meter K1.  It was her third gold medal of these Games, and with eight Olympic golds in her career, she is now tied for the record with Birgit Fischer of Germany.

The women's 200-meter C1 final was the last of the regatta, and it could not have been more dramatic.  Nevin Harrison of Seattle, Washington, came in as the defending Olympic champion, but it was clear that she had her work cut out for her when she finished second in her semifinal to Canadian paddler Katie Vincent.  Seven of the eight finalists broke 46 seconds in the semifinal round, including reigning world champion Yarisleidis Cirilo Duboys of Cuba.

Harrison got a good start in the final and led by maybe half a meter at the halfway point, and in a race so short I thought that might be enough for her to take it.  But Vincent put on a tremendous second-half surge, and the two women broke the finish line like this:

You can see who the three medalists are--from top to bottom, they're Vincent, Cirilo Duboys, and Harrison.  But did Vincent break the line first, or did Harrison?  Honestly, I don't know how you determine a winner in such a situation.  Apparently the officials had the necessary technology, and in the end Vincent was declared the winner.  Her official margin of victory was one one-hundredth of a second, 44.12 to 44.13, but in reality I think the margin was just a few thousandths.  44.12 is also the fastest time ever recorded in this event, a "world best" (the sport does not recognize "world records," because no two venues are alike and there are too many variables that impact a boat's hull speed).

Yesterday's 200-meter C1 semifinal results are posted here, and the final results are here.  You can watch NBC's coverage of the race here.

All told, I’d say my nation’s team had its most successful regatta in quite a few years.  Certainly, having an athlete the caliber of Nevin Harrison helps, but I'm encouraged by how the other two U.S. athletes, Aaron Small and Jonas Ecker, did as well.

What I really hope is that in the future the U.S. will be able to take something closer to a full team to the Olympics--C2s, K4s, everything.  I think the meager U.S. contingents we've seen in recent Games is partly the result of the national governing body not having its act together, but most of the blame should be directed straight at the I.O.C., which has stubbornly limited the number of Olympic paddlers (slalom and flatwater combined) to a very modest figure.  Women's canoe classes made their debut at Tokyo three years ago, and I think that's absolutely a good thing, but rather than add them to the mix to make a great sport even better, the I.O.C. insisted on making cuts elsewhere, eliminating men's slalom C2, to preserve their precious athlete quota.  The cuts got even more draconian with the addition this summer of something called "kayak cross."  In the flatwater sprint regatta at Paris there was just one distance available to each boat class.  Men's K1 paddlers raced only 1000 meters; no more 200 or 500.  The women's C1s raced only the 200-meter distance.  The men's K2s raced only the 500-meter distance.  And so on.  In track and field there are distances for the full range of athletic abilities, from sprinting to middle-distance running to long-distance running.  But if you're a female K1 racer and 500 meters is not the distance to which you're best suited... too bad.

I get it that there needs to be some kind of cap on the number of athletes in each sport.  Just housing and feeding those people requires tremendous resources.  But what gets under my skin is that while the I.O.C. won't budge on athlete quotas for sports like ours, they go and let in sports that I think are a joke (I'm looking at you, break dancing).  What's more, the Olympic programme includes sports for which an Olympic gold medal is not the ultimate achievement.  The level of play in the Olympic men's basketball tournament is not as high as it is in the N.B.A. playoffs, and I doubt it ever will be.  And so in my view, basketball does not belong in the Olympics.

Yes, these are the issues I get all worked up about every four years.  But, well... big world-class events like the Olympic Games are important an all, but to me, going out and paddling my own boat here at home is every bit as important.  And that's what I did yesterday morning once I'd digested the results from Paris.  It was another two-boat session--about 40 minutes in the surfski an 20 minutes in the whitewater boat.  The weather was just plain delightful: the high temperature yesterday was around 84 degrees Fahrenheit with a pleasant north breeze.  We complain about our hot summers around here, but we do get some breaks between heat waves, and the break we're having now is about as nice a one as I can ever remember in August.

Today is Sunday, and Sunday is Funday!  I started it off with a gym session, and that's not what I consider the most fun thing to do, but then I went down to the river in search of fun, and it looked like I would get it when I reached the mouth of the harbor: heading upstream from below the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas Bridges was a big old barge rig with a nice-looking wake behind it.  I paddled out to do about the most fun thing you can do in a kayak or canoe--surf some big waves.  The ones in the main wave train behind the towboat were very large and very steep and moving very fast, and I could never quite get the boat up to speed to catch them.  As I fell farther back the waves quickly flattened out, and I feared I had missed out on my Sunday Funday fun.  But as I kept paddling against the river's current I started finding all kinds of residual waves that had linkable patterns.  Each time I caught a wave and gained some speed, I worked to take that speed onto another wave.  It wasn't exactly epic surfing--I had to sprint so hard and so often that before long my arms, already tired from the gym session, were screaming. But it was fun to get out and challenge myself and work on some skills, not to mention my lactic acid system.

The Olympics are wrapping up today, but you can bet I'll keep doing my thing, and sharing it here.

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