Yuliya Trushkina, a member of the Individual Neutral Athletes delegation at the Paris Olympics, awaits the start of the women's 200-meter C1 "Final A" on Saturday.
That canoe she's in has all the stability of a floating telephone pole. Some 20 years ago I got the chance to paddle a boat like that. Even though I had paddled whitewater canoes for many years, and was also able to handle a fairly tippy surfski, I was unable to paddle that boat more than six or eight strokes before I went for a swim.
Athletes who are able to race canoes like this one at a world-class level, bringing to bear all the power in their arms, shoulders, torsos, and legs, have the same kind of balance that elite-level gymnasts have. Once in a while somebody wants to tell me that paddling a canoe doesn't require the same degree of skill as "real" sports like basketball and football and so on, and I want to tell that person to get in a boat like the one pictured above and just stay upright for five seconds; forget propelling the thing forward at 4+ meters per second for up to a kilometer.
We saw elite-level balance among the whitewater paddlers in Paris, too. Check out the move at 0:47 of this video. Keep watching and see other athletes do the same move. Most of them make it look easy, but that move is hard. I know because I've tried, and usually failed, to do moves just like that one.
The fact is, top canoe and kayak racers are elite-level athletes. Just as elite-level as LeBron James. Just as elite-level as Simone Biles. Just as elite-level as Novak Djokovic. Just as elite-level as Scottie Sheffler.
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