Review of the 2013 British Open Canoe Slalom

David Bain | Sportscene - The British Open is nothing new in the UK, for many years races were held on sites such as HPP, Llangollen’s Town Falls and now the site of the 2012 Olympics Lee Valley White Water Course.

This year was a massive improvement on previous years for as long as I can remember with numerous top international competitors making the journey to the UK as well as some of our own top paddlers. The weather stayed bright for the majority of the weekend and despite a cold wind was fairly pleasant.

The race format was also altered slightly with Saturday and Sunday’s racing being completely separate allowing all paddlers to have 4 runs on the site.

Saturday’s course was a fairly open course with various moves using the features. Sub 100s times were seen right from the start with Hannes Aigner (GER) taking the win closely followed by Britain’s own Richard Hounslow.

Course designer Gaz Wilson upped the game for Sunday’s race with an extremely technical course set for the duration of the run. This provided some excellent excitement with everyone being pushed to the limits of trying to stay fast while tackling the tough moves.

Hannes Aigner went on to perform again achieving first place followed by Huw Swetnam and James Bailey. The British J18 paddler Bradley Forbes-Cryans took 4th place.

The British paddlers dominated the C1M category. Double world champion David Florence took the win with Mark Proctor and Tomas Quinn taking the other medal spots.

In the K1W Fiona Pennie came threw with an extremely strong performance with Emilie Fer (FRA) and Melanie Pfeifer (GER) in second and third place.

The British Open also brings a close to the UK premier ranking series with Joe Clarke, the U23 Silver medalist gaining the number one bib in the K1M, Fiona Pennie in K1W and Tom Quinn in the C1M.

Thanks to the British Slalom Committee for running the event and John Gregory for the results analysis.