Controversial plan comes to debatable ending
“I have a cunning plan.”
It’s not impossible to imagine that being uttered by Canoe Racing New Zealand boss Graham Oberlin-Brown and his brains trust when figuring out how the organisation could get a men’s K4 team to race at the Paris Olympics.
The value of the plan – and its execution – may still be debated.
But the end result – the K4 team making an OIympic final, in which they finished eighth and last on Thursday – may have satisfied CRNZ that it had achieved its aim.
The method to do so – required after New Zealand had only one K2 500 quota spot, and another in the K1 1000 – has been in the spotlight this week at the Games.
As first reported by Stuff in May, a NZ C2 men’s crew qualified for the 2024 Olympics in a race against just two other crews – featuring a competitor in his 70s. Other rival paddlers were in their 60s and 40s respectively, when CRNZ gained the quota spot at the Oceania Championships regatta in Sydney in February.
That allowed CRNZ to use it to form a men’s K4 500 crew for Paris – while also still having to contest the C2 event.
It was a move which drew criticism from within the canoeing community, who were concerned that whoever was in the boat for the C2 class was going to be embarrassed at the Olympics when competing in an event they have minimal experience at, and were expected to be well off the pace in Paris – and so it proved.
Max Brown and Grant Clancy were given the job to contest the class, which sees the paddlers kneel and use a singlebladed paddle to propel the canoe forward. In their heat, they were more than 40 seconds slower than the nextworst finishers, and in their quarterfinals, Brown and Clancy were last of the five entries,.
With the New Zealand pair also having to contest two K4 500 races on the same day, the call was clearly made to not exert themselves to any extent in the C2 races. They took it as easy as they possibly could in their B final on Thursday, finishing more than 35s behind Angola in 2:31.04, as the two paddlers were required to save as much energy as they could for the K4 final, which followed just 20 minutes later.
The K4 500 class at the 2024 Olympics had 11 entrants. More may have been expected of the priority men’s kayak by some than eighth, but New Zealand hasn’t had a men’s kayak crew win a medal at the Games since Ferguson and Paul Macdonald in Seoul in 1988.
Should the men’s programme develop to the stage where they’re constant medal-winners at the highest level – and the canoe discipline grows in this country – CRNZ can indeed claim that going into the trenches against the pounding artillery fire of public opinion was worth the risk, and will also pay more dividends going forth.