GBR Freestyle Team Selection for 2012 Vienna Euros

Our GBR team selection to pick the team to compete at next years European champs in Vienna is a 3 competition format with the best 2 results out of the 3 counting.

This weekends event at Hpp, Nottingham was the first 2 comps of the 3. One on the Saturday in the inlet gate and one on the Sunday in the Twin waves. 3 rides best 2 count.

For me I am away for the last comp of the 3 the Hurley Rodeo so I needed to do well to secure my place.

I’m not going to go into that much detail on my runs but I managed pretty sweet rides hit a few of my combos both days (2400 on Sat, 1600 on Sunday) to take the double win and give me a guaranteed spot on the team to compete at the Euros

Palm’s Bren Orton got two 2nd place finishes in the Juniors to get his place guaranteed and Palm’s Lowri Davies also made the team

The main thing about the weekend was the incredibly high standard, the level of kayaking here is phenomenal. To make the mens top 10 on Saturday you needed to score something like 1200 or more!! The Juniors and the ex juniors who have just moved to senior are killing it! Its a credit to the awesome setup of events such as the Youth Freestyle series and the great freestyle spots we have allover the UK.

All summer me, Bren Orton, James Benn’s, James Weight, Ryan Liqourish & David Wild have been paddling a lot together working on our moves and trying to develop new moves or combinations of merged moves. This event our whole group put on a sick showing nailing sweet rides as well as pretty much all of our combo’s we’ve invented.

The point we wanted to make by getting our combos in a comp environment was to illustrate the need for some additions or some changes to the current scoring. For example if you merge a Lunar Orbit with a Tricky Whu with a Loop it only gets scored a Trophy 3 (200) but if you were to do them seperately you would get 380… For hole kayaking we need to encourage people to learn these moves and go for them in comps so they need to be scored much higher in order to reward the risk/ skill involved to hit them.

Anyhow I had a real fun weekend and was super proud watching the standard of kayaking in all categories here. This last 3 years the standard and depth of talent here continues to explode, its so good to see.

Here is a video Jonny Williams put up of some of the action from Saturday:-

Pringle

All the results will be up soon on GB Freestyle website for those who want to see exact scores.

Photos by:- Simon Thorne, Chris Throne & Bren Orton