Almost five years ago, small keels, plastic pieces of a few centimeters like those that carry surfboards, forced Maialen Chourraut, the valid Slalom canoeing Olympic champion, to take a search that lasted too much and pushed it to
Despair.
If this Tuesday is in Tokyo Games (07.57 hours, semifinals and 09.15 hours, the final) to defend the Olympic gold of it is per pure insistence, for not wanting a technical detail as that defeat it.
But there were times when she thought that the road would end badly.
It all started just after the 2016 Rio Games. The International Federation of Canoeing (ICF) greatly limited the size of those keels – an arbitrary decision like so many others – thus invalidated the kayak that the Spanish was wearing all life and forced her To make a call against his will. She played asking a manufacturer to make a new piragua adjusted to the regulation, but when she arrived … Oh, friend! “The kayak without the keels skipped a lot from behind, it looked like a shopping cart, and we started looking at models, and models, and more models, I think we tried 25 pirage, it was desperate. Maiaen is tiny, but it moves the ass for Get the canoe well in the water and we did not find anything that fits your characteristics. There were some that could be done well, but they were not fast. Others who were fast, but they skidded too much. In the 2017 World and 2019 , because the canoe was leaked up, and it was like … buf! I could not anymore. And in the end it came well that the games were delayed because we find the good pirogue in January 2021, “Narra Xabi Etxaniz, trainer And Chourraut’s husband about that Eureka!.
“We saw that a Frenchman had a smaller version of a canoe that Maialen had already tried in 2018 and that he ruled out because he was too big, and we were running the manufacturer to ask for an equal or even a little smaller. They sent us up to four sizes and
, finally, at the beginning of this year we gave with the perfect one. Nothing else to see her, Maialen said: ‘This yes’. And finding it it helped it a lot to get better to these games, “says the coach on the Kasai Canal, in Tokyo
, just after Ander Elosegi ends eighth in his test.
The one Monday was the fourth Olympic diploma for the Spanish, which was already a fourth in the Games of Beijing 2008 and in Los London 2012.
Heat and moisture turn the place into a jacuzzi in which you can not be without sweat, but both Etxaniz and Chourraut smile because they have come here to enjoy.
In addition to the change of regulation with the kayak, the canoeing suffered multiple injuries during the Olympic cycle and now, already recovered, she just wants to “flow, have a good time”.
“They have been complicated years, it has happened to us of everything, we have moved from the Seu d’Urgell to San Sebastián … many things, but Maialen arrives very well, very strong,” forecast Etxaniz and seeing the rivals you can think
in anything.
On the list, for example, the New Zealand Luuka Jones and the Australian Jessica Fox, who were already defeated by the Spanish five years ago.
The channel is supposed “very difficult”, as that of the 2016 Rio Games, so Chourraut, experienced as anyone, has that please.
After many changes in her life and, above all, a change of piragua that cost her nerves, she is already prepared for a third Olympic medal, who knows if the second gold.
