Five-time Olympic Games gold medallist Lisa Carrington has won a third K1 500m world canoe sprint championship title.
The 33-year-old was one of four Tokyo Olympic champions to strike gold in Dartmouth, Canada on Saturday (Sunday NZ time).
Carrington was made to work hard into a strong headwind to secure her title on Lake Banook in Nova Scotia.
“We knew it was going to be a headwind all week, so I was definitely prepared, it’s just about having that mindset about how to strategically paddle into that headwind,” Carrington said.“There’s still lots to learn from, like today continuously putting myself into a position where I have to rise up to the challenge, or take some opportunities or some learnings from it, so every moment of pressure is a great learning opportunity.”
Carrington won in 1min 58.69sec from Annamaria Govorcinovic (Croatia) with Germany’s Jule Hake third.
It was the second time in successive world championships that a New Zealander was on top of the K1 500m podium.
Aimee Fisher – who Carrington beat in an epic three-race duel in April to earn the world championsihps nod – won the event in Denmark last year.
Earlier in the day, Carrington and her young K4 Kiwi crew finished fifth in their 500m final, agonisingly close to the podium.
While Poland were clear ahead to take the win, a mere 0.6 seconds separated second and fifth places.
In other events, Peter Cowan started the day with eigjth in his Men’s VL3 A fnal the K4 men were 8th in the 500m B-Final.
To round out the penultimate day of racing, Ashton Reiser was third in his K1 500m C Final and James Munro placed ninth in the K1 1000m B final.
Balint Kopask (Hungary), the Tokyo men’s K1 100m champion and Chinese duo Xu Shixao (China) and Sun Mengya, who won the Olympic women’s C2 500m gold, also triumphed at Dartmouth.
There were also wins for the Polish women’s K4 crew, Spain’s men’s K4 and the Spanish C2 500 crew of Cayetano Garcia and Pablo Martinez.
In non-Olympic races there were world titles to Brazil’s Isaquias dos Santos, Czech Josef Dostal, Poland’s Oleksii Koliadych, Hungary’s Blanka Kiss and Anna Lucz, Cuba’s Yarisleidis Duboys and Katherin Segura and Ukraine’s Liudmyla Luzan.
Credit: stuff.co.nz
