Nick Harding | @nickhdg | Sportscene - John Gregory becomes Sportscene's slalom guru; his 25 years of canoeing experience means new high-ropes for our coverage.

John is a commentator, magazine contributor, supporter to GB Canoeing, current GB slalom coach who trains many of the British young-guns and golden oldies. He currently also writes for the Cardiff World Cup 2013 website. John is 'Mr Slalom'.

I am honoured to be contributing to Sportscene as I am happy to support those with an equal genuine passion for sharing this wonderful paddlesport with others, both to profile the top end of Olympic canoe slalom and inspire anyone to pick up a paddle for the very first time.

He also likes a bit of canoe polo too on the side, having played competitively for years.

John was discovered by Sportscene Director Rob because of his unofficial London 2012 Olympic slalom blog. Rob became an instant fan, he initiated a partnership and provided John with photographs to accompany his posts. [Any die-hard bloggers take note from this, you don't know who could be reading your blog!]

John pioneered his slalom results and daily news blog outside of mainstream media channels, and by doing so, it actually became one of the most browsed canoe sites high up Google searches during the Games – almost enviable by major media outlets themselves. 

So why was his blog so successful? Nothing to do with design here; passion, knowledge and an innate ability to write analytically are his golden eggs. John is the man ruthlessly calculating his own slalom point system in stinging rain and the freezing cold when no one else will.

He has a raw ability to generate statistics, like magic-eyes, that no-one else can fathom out which are amusing and interesting to both avid slalom-fans and the everyday bloke.

I had the pleasure of meeting and reporting with John last weekend at the Lee Valley GB slalom selection trials; watching him pick apart the end of day results with a toothpick, so to speak, was a learning-experience.

Most gratifying was seeing how he was able to analyse timed runs in his head, and comment mathematically about their performance to the paddlers only moments after coming off the water.

So what does this mean for Sportscene fans? Nothing but up-to-date slalom action coverage!

John will be covering slalom World Cups with daily race round ups. This means we can get down to the nitty-gritty of overall standings, watch patterns emerge, see which countries are coming up strongly through the series, reflect and compare back to 2012 season as well as the Olympics. Let's see if we can make some accurate predictions for Rio 2016!

Sportscene fans also have previews and after-event analyses to look forward to courtesy of John and our media team. Look out for John's mention in an up-and-coming article on Roger Fox.

Also interested in joining the Sportscene Media Team? Visit www.sportscene.tv/opportunities

Links

• Twitter John Gregory: @gregiej
• Blog: http://unofficialolympiccanoeslalom.wordpress.com
• Cardiff World Cup site: Interview with Richard Hounslow and David Florence
• You can see some photos of John with GB athletes on our Facebook gallery