Nick Harding | Sportscene - In this 20-minute documentary Sportscene Director Rob schmoozes over the growing popularity of kayak-trick disciplines with World Freestyle and Squirt Champion, GB's Claire O'Hara.

Her interview takes places at Penrith Whitewater Stadium, just outside of Sydney where they held the Olympics in 2000. Quality weather, lush greens behind her; this is a peaceful edit with a real down-to-earth (and dare I say very natural on-camera) paddler who has done so much for the profile of kayak freestyle. 

Claire too, tells us there is something different about Penrith; it's well-landscaped, has lots of palms, on-looked by the nearby Blue Mountains, it's not the cold-faced, stony artificial Mecca with plastic bollards everywhere we see oh so often in Europe.

Penrith has spawned numerous champions like World C1 Champion Ros Lawrence, who we featured last week. She moved here to combine study and training, Ros too dabbles in freestyle.

Leeds-lady Claire is fresh from her Uganda trip where she spent 5 weeks after the New Year paddling at least twice a day on the Nile. For many a paddler the Nile has become an attractive winter training destination – warmer water and air temperature, perfect play waves, vast and wide tributaries and, as Claire adds, the magic of Africa surrounds you.

20 minutes from the river, she stayed at the Hairy Lemon camp-site with neither fuss nor logistics nightmares; just getting up and practising here is becoming highly appealing to elite paddlers, the site markets itself as a kayak resort.

From Uganda, it was off to New Zealand paddling Okere Falls (do check out the exciting footage of both kayak and raft lines). Paddling here is an entirely different beast from Africa – there's lesser volume of water being funnelled through tighter gorges that make some stonking grade 5 features.

As current World Champion, she has been pre-selected for this year's Worlds being held on the Nantahala River in the US in September. So maxing her unusual free time, she has had an enviable opportunity to travel further afield to get to know some new spots; like extreme paddler Martina Wegman, her love of travel got her into the sport.

Claire is a warm weather pilgrim this year following perfect training conditions. Her journey next takes her back to Europe, Nottingham specifically to train with her coach, then off to America as soon as possible to really get comfortable with the terrain before the Worlds in 4 months. 

Claire is working on a few goodies she wants to keep up her sleeve until this competition. Yes, she's driven to defend her title but also wants to give her best performance when the curtain goes up, pushing her ability further, nailing some new versions of old tricks. 

Not only does she push herself to improve, she has also proudly been involved in increasing the public profile of freestyle sport along with fellow Brit and male Freestyle World Champion James 'Pringle' Bebbington.

Competing at London 2012 in a demonstration event to crowds of 12,000 daily, as she says, was memorable – a child convincing his parents to stay the whole day just so he could watch the kayak tricksters!

Any stigma that freestyle and squirt are just surf disciplines for non-go hard paddlers has gone out the window. Now there is real promise and push to make this another Olympic canoe discipline and more and more youngsters are getting involved.

Website Claire O'Hara: www.claireohara.co.uk