The Paddler Autumn/Fall issue 2017

ThePADDLER 128
Training days
The qualification course was enough for me at
these high levels: around half the paddlers there
were opting out of the entire course, due to the
TNT section, particularly in the light that the
safety team are not present for the training days
(it’s too expensive). After some deliberation,
Mike ran the whole course. To our
disappointment, he was fine. He has never
swum, and I had half-hoped he might do it here,
with a humiliating man hug rescue from one of
the many live bait guys lining then banks (the
safety here is brilliant). Mike’s one run down the
main course gave him 129th place out of 175.
Only the top 52 men going through. If I tell you
that Peter Csonka, ex-freestyle champion, only
just made the grade, that will give an idea of
how stiff the competition here is.
Tom provided far more entertainment, taking
four runs down the qualifier section, each one
seemingly more comically awful than the one
before it. On his last, the crowd erupted in
cheers as he finally rolled up for the umpteenth
time just as he crossed the finishing line upside
down. Rob, Mike and I sighed in
disappointment, having hoped for a swim. In all
seriousness though, Tom showed some bravery
in going out and getting battered again and
again, and always rolling up. That’s what I mean
about the playboater thing. The other thing
about this is that the qualification course,
although a stiff, intimidating challenge, is still a
place where you can laugh about swims.
On Friday night, the Big O movie night showed
a short film of Bren Orton’s first descent of
Norway’s steep, long creek, Megatron, and a fulllength
film of some massive-volume expedition
paddling in Pakistan – Into the Indus. We
checked in at the well-named Losers’ Party on
the way home. An angry, disappointed paddler…
an eponymous loser if you like… stood outside,
and angrily kicked a can against the wall as we
walked past, while a few peers inside sipped
beer quietly. We enjoyed this spectacle almost as
much as the empassioned young man who
nearly burst into tears at seeing his result that
day, but we passed the party by, returning to our
rented flat to watch Enter the Dragon and
engage in puerile, vacuous banter until bedtime,
an art we are well versed in.
Finals day saw the level drop slightly to the high
180s, still a chunky level, and the sun out.
Favourites to take it, with double British winner
Joe Morley out of the running, were three-times
NZ winner Sam Sutton; US phenomenon Dane
Jackson, whose achievements in kayaking are so
broad and numerous that he has to be counted
as a contender in whatever he enters; last year’s
winner, the Catalonian paddler Aniol Serrasolses
and the 2015 winner, his brother Gerd.
Winners
In the end Dane took the all-time course record
in 53.8 seconds in the semis. But in the final,
where it counted, Sam put in a good run of 54.9s
to be crowned the 2017 Sickline men’s winner,
for an amazing fourth time. It must have felt
good, after having lost out to Catalonian paddler
Aniol Serrasolses last year by just a hundredth of
a second. In the women’s race, Nouria Newman
beat her nearest rival by two seconds to take
the crown for the first time.
“I was struggling in the high water levels,” Sam
Sutton told Paddler magazine as he stepped off
the podium, a modest statement profoundly
belied by his run. I had a few minutes with race
director Mike Hammel, who told me that
inclusivity is a big part of the Sickline. “It’s not F1”
he told me. “You can’t win it with money,” a point
underlined by a survey conducted during this
year’s event, where a two-thirds majority voted
against carbon boats in the race.
A slightly harder question to answer is how
the event can call itself the world
championship of extreme kayaking, when there
are other races that are more challenging (like
the North Fork or Green River) and in some
cases have been around longer than the decade
Sickline has been running for.