European Championships and the Alps

Immediately after breaking up from school, I flew to Porto (and then drove onto Spain) for the European Freestyle Championships. This was my first year in the GB team, and I was travelling reserve for the junior ladies, and competing in the king of the wave! 

We (me, dad and Lowri Davies) arrived at the town late on the Saturday before the comp. It was very hot and being stuck in a car with no air conditioning hadn’t helped! After driving around the town for about half an hour just looking for the hotel we managed to find it and meet up with everyone else who was already there. I took this opportunity to find out what the wave was like and just catch up with people.

 

The ‘wave’ with no water – Saturday night

There was no official team training until a few days after I arrived but I was still waiting for my boat (we had given it to someone who was driving across). It arrived the day before team training started so, eager to get out of the boiling sun, I jumped on. Unfortunately this was just before the wave started to drop so I only got one surf. The next time I just flushed!

By this time everyone had arrived so team training started the next day. We were only given 1 hour on the water and, as we were the biggest team, we were split in to two halves so it was only half an hour. This session was just getting used to the wave as I kept on flushing on the far shoulder. The next day was also team training but this time we were last so we could stay on afterwards. The level that day was a great level (at least for me) so I stayed on for three hours until I was shattered! It was only interrupted at around 2 in the afternoon by about four people snorkeling  down the wave!

I’m the dot on the right, spin to win!

Because only people who were competing were allowed on after that the rest of my week was spent cheering on all the competitors and checking out the local sights. I even tried squid which I found disgusting! Oh, and I also was lucky enough to be asked to be flag bearer at the opening ceremony, it wasn’t quite as grand as the olympics, but it was still another first – and great all the same.

I was still really sad that I didn’t get a chance to compete but I was pleased that I managed to see how a competition like this works and how people deal with the pressure. It was great how well we did as well especially Flea and Dave coming 1st in the senior women and C1 respectively.

Before I knew it my week was up and I was flying to Lyon with Lowri to spend a week in the Alps. We stopped off for a few days at the white water corse near Lyon. We didn’t do that much paddling though! We met up with another family so we spent most of the time going down the course in a raft, swimming to cool off and on hydrospeeds (small surfboards). These were such fun especially playing king of the wave on them.

 

After a few days we set off for the Alps. It took around three hours thorough the mountains. The scenery was breathtaking. We stopped of for a quick bite to eat up the top of them before setting of again, after Lowri debated leaving me up there (she has a problem with smelly kit!). We arrived at the camp site quite late, just before it got dark, and met up with the group of people we were going to paddle with,

The next day me and Lowri, along with a few other people, went to Rabioux. This was one of the biggest things I had run (’cause we have such small water in the UK). Lowri went down right in front of me and got back looped. All I remember is seeing that just as I went over and thinking great thats going to be me in a second! Thankfully I managed to boof over so I didn’t get sucked in but it took a while for Lowri to come out again.

The rest of the week was spent running the rivers around the Alps. The setting is just so nice! The only bad thing is that because the waters right off a glacier it’s freezing cold. Probably my favorite place was the Race course. I was the only one in a playboat so I was kind of worried that I would be backflipped but that only happened once and not even on one of the bigger drops!

I was sad to be leaving the Alps as there were still a few rivers that I wanted to run but we had a long drive ahead of us. I would defiantly love to go to there again and stay for a bit longer. Next time I might even get to go to Hawaii sur la Rhone!

I’m off to a family holiday in Ireland this weekend (no boating!), hope to see some of you at the Festival of Freestyle in September

Tash

x

Me in the Alps (c)Lowri Davies 2008