Olympic Flame visits Lee Valley

 

 

Shortly after getting back from the european championships in Lienz,Austria, I got the chance to head to lee valley and take part in an event to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic flame at the official site for the london 2012 slalom event.

Lee Valley is host to by far one of the best white water courses I have ever paddled, long and continuous with some fairly large drops for a white water course, there is an abundant amount of play features however rescently the course has been fine tuned to fit the slalomists needs and the play features weren’t quite dialled in to what they could be, but were still great fun.

We were paired up and assigned a feature to play in, myself and Dan Chamlet spent most of our time in the hole under the bridge, whilst Josh Wedgwood and Sam Stephenson went to the bottom of the course where a fairly powerfull and sticky hole forms with a small green wave just behind it, We had a great time, with no pressure, as our only instructions where to have fun and look happy. Some big moves were pulled, lots of wipe outs where had, from hitting the bottom of the course and stalling out on loops and some downriver moves where hit along the way, it seemed to go down fairly well with the crowd .

We where mainly filling in the gaps whilst the Gb raft team carrying the Olympic flame made their way back up to the top of the course, Despite valiant efforts by Zack Franklin and the raft team to keep the torch dry, the continuous Lee valley white water course took it’s toll and eventually extinguished the flame, Luckily someone had foresaw that this was quite a likely scenario and a back up flame was nearby to relight it.

The torch then continued on to Newport carried by Jamie Oliver,

Check out the video of Day here : http://www.london2012.com/torch-relay/video/video=torch-relay-day50.html

A huge thanks to Colin Woodgate and the organisers/participants,

See you on the water,

Bren