World Kayak Event Coverage » Christopher Wing

FIBArk Event Coverage

Christopher Wing — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:36:10 +0000

The 61st Annual FIBArK (First In Boating the Arkansas) Festival has already kicked off here in Salida, CO with live musics, movie premiers and feverish practicing from kayakers of all disciplines. Salida plays host this year to the USA Wildwater National Championships as well as a dozen other kayaking events.

Tomorrow starts the competition with Wildwater sprints and the Pine Creek Boater X which puts out its fair share of carnage in the infamous Pine Creek Rapid where a towering hole awaits racers mid-course. For those that have the skill to negotiate the course it should be a fairly uneventful race, however, as it usually does the squirrelly water upstream of the hole sends racers off course and plummeting into the guts of the hole.

I will have the HD camera courtesy of Rapid Transit Video set close to the hole to capture the grimmace of racers as they approach and hopefully smash into the turbulent whitewater. Competition footage will be posted during the weekend while other events will be broadcasted live via the web on WKTV. We will be covering the Prelims for all of the freestyle events on Friday starting at 2:00 PM EST. Event Coverage continues the next day with the Hooligan Race at 7:30 PM EST shortly followed by the freestyle finals under the lights in the famous Salida Hole.

The Hooligan Race is a crowd favorite as participants are encourage to wear extremely ridiculous costumes while paddling barely floatable homemade crafts down the river through the play hole. The freestyle, being the last major Colorado competition is anyone’s game as many of the favorites over the years have been being beat consistently all season long.

Thursday – Pine Creek Boater X, video to follow this weekend during broadcasts

Friday – Freestyle Prelims, live broadcast starts at 2:00 PM EST

Saturday – Hooligan Race and Freestyle Finals, live broadcast starts at 7:30 PM EST

Live Coverage Continues at FIBArk, enjoy some Homestake

Christopher Wing — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:34:01 +0000

Event Coverage on WKTV will continue during the weekend of June 18-21 during the 61st Annual FIBArk River Festival. Until then…

Click here to view the embedded video.

TEVA Results and Photos

Christopher Wing — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:17:40 +0000

Men’s Freestyle Results

1. Stephen Wright

2. Nick Troutman

3. Dustin Urban

4. Casper VonKolmf

5. Andrew Holcombe

Women’s Freestyle Results

1. Emily Jackson

2. Tanya Faux

3. Ruth Gordon

4. Nicole Mansfield

5. Devon Barker

Check ya later… TEVA makes huge cut

Christopher Wing — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:09:09 +0000

The preliminaries for the Pro Freestyle kicked off today around 1:00 PM with 44 competitors in the men class and 16 women. As with most preliminary competitions the majority of the rides were conservative where competitors were given 2 rides with their points from both combine to determine who moved on. The top 15 of the men and 10 of the women were honored to move on to the semi’s tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM, where WKTV will resume coverage.

I personally like to compare this competition to a test in lung tolerance, where many competitors question whether or not they want to throw that next trick or stay above water for air. A lesson in controlled drowning for sure. What was obvious were the competitors who train in the mountains at altitude vs those “flatlanders” that came from the east.

Tomorrow the competition will definitely turn up a notch when the cut will be down to 5 for each class in this highly contested competition. TEVA is for sure the most dominant among other competitions with their big cash purses, 1st place will walk away with $2000. WKTV broadcast will resume around 12:00 PM EST time and will take you through the drama of the semi’s and finals. Based on last years finals, you will not want to miss this.

TEVA PRELIM RESULTS

Hungry for Homestake?

Christopher Wing — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:48:50 +0000

Unlike the last couple of weeks, the skies were blue and cloudless… that was until predictably the rain clouds organized around 2:30. Fortunately the race was over at that point, so competitors were treated to 70 deg temperatures and sunny skies whereas last year it was raining and sleeting.
Last year was one of the most entertaining in regards to carnage, the lines today were for the most part smooth and uneventful. The level was around 115 cfs for the event and manky as usual. I figure if this is any other day of the week, most paddlers would choose to paddle a different creek. And for this reason, it is one of the most spectator friendly for any event.
I guess you could say this is kind of like NASCAR, people don’t come to see you do well, they come to see you crash. With drop names such as upper and lower Junkyard, Champagne, The Perfect Boof, Little Sunshine and Leap of Faith, you know there is some action to be had.
The most notable carnage of the day was Alex Hotze side pinning near the top of the course where he was rescued by one of the safety crew. Another unfortunate paddler ran the majority of Champagne on his head, though he recovered quite well and greased the remainder of the course.
The competition was stacked in both the men’s and women’s classes and placement was made by tenths of seconds in many cases.
I like most of today’s spectators would have loved to see more NASCAR style crashes, but are always happy to see the competitors remain uninjured. That being said I am hoping for some additional carnage on Sunday during the 8-Ball Race for the lack of adrenal rushes.
Full results are below, make sure to click on the text Steep Creek Sheet 1, I will be providing results in PDF format for the remainder of the season. Some video will be following as well.

STEEP CREEK CHAMPIONSHIPS RESULTS

2009 US Team for Worlds Decided

Christopher Wing — Sun, 31 May 2009 22:32:46 +0000

A few surprises occurred in the US Team Trials Semi and Finals today. Competition kicked off once again at 9:00 AM promptly, highly unlike kayakers. The top 5 men, top 3 women, top 3 jr men, top 2 jr women, top 2 OC-1 were decided through an amazingly close competition and included some major upsets as well.

The wave continued to be an extremely challenging feature to deal with as at times the wave would green out and flush the competitors off of the wave, however that did not keep all competitors from being conservative as the biggest air from the whole competition occurred today.

The city of Glenwood has to be thanked for putting together a well organized event for their first major competition. The event overall was pretty low key as the main focus was in establishing the US Team for the upcoming worlds in Thun, Switzerland.

After competition concluded, the competitors who advance on to world’s met for their first team meeting where they were fitted with their US team vests provided by Astral Buoyancy. It was a very exciting day of competition and the all of the competitors should be commended for their performance this weekend.

Team H2o Dreams will be travelling to Vail, Colorado next for the TEVA Mountain Games later this upcoming week. We will be broadcasting first from The Homestake Creek Race on Thursday live creekside, unless mother nature prooves to be difficult in which we will post footage after the race. The US team members are listed below and more pictures and footage will follow in the next day. Congrats to all!

usteam-sheet1

Success!! All Systems Go on Liftoff, launch of WKTV

Christopher Wing — Sat, 30 May 2009 23:59:31 +0000

I just checked Boatertalk and I believe the lack of comments deems it a success, The one comment of the nice video was very nice as well. We kicked of the official launch of World Kayak TV today during the preliminary round of the US Team Trials.

World Kayak brought in a total of 8300 viewers throughout the day, which in the kayaking community is unheard of. World Kayak is truly bringing the competition home to the viewers, its original intent. We will continue to bring live coverage the remainder of the competitive season all the way through the World Championships in Thun, Switzerland at the end of August.

The competition was tough as water levels rose on the Colorado, somewhere in the range of 12,000 cfs which creates a few dead zones on the wave at random moments in time. Many of the top competitors chose to take more conservative rides to stay on the wave throughout their 45 second ride. Each competitor was given four 45 second rides, where their top two scores were taken and combined for their overall score. The top 10 men, 10 women, 3 Jr Women, 10 Jr Men, and 2 OC-1 were determined today and those remaining few move on to the Semi’s and Finals tomorrow. C-1 and Cadet will compete tomorrow as well.

Results are in PDF Format below… more to follow with competition coverage tomorrow where www.elevationlifestylenetwork.com will professionally broadcast the event with 6 studio cameras and a mobile broadcasting station for a pay per view fee of $4.95. It was a pleasure to be a part of the first true live broadcast to the web in kayaking history. Me and the rest of h2odreams.com look forward to bring you more. Special thanks to Jackie Newman, Jake Ament, Annie Ament, Vaughn Corum, Tracy d’Arbeloff, Eric Jackson, Clay Wright, Jeremy Laucks, Chris Stafford, Brian Kirk and Andrew Holcomb for stepping in and doing some guest commentating.

prelimresults-sheet11

Reno River Festival Men’s, Women’s and Juniors Finals

Christopher Wing — Sun, 10 May 2009 07:42:43 +0000

The Reno River Festival Invitational was not nearly as long winded as the Open event yesterday. However, a few of the competitors from yesterday faired very well among the dominant freestylers in the sport. Erin Clancy, came out and placed in the top five after working her way through the Open event yesterday and then beating the majority of the invites today. Another mentionable, is Kevin “KB” Brown who was a competitor who made it to the invite last year and earned himself an auto-invite this year. He managed to make it along to the top five as well.

Those that made the podium are very familiar names that we have grown to hear time after time in freestyle competition. Though some competitors who have won in years past have been knocked down by those who have been apparently working very hard to beat them.

In the women’s class, Emily Jackson was finally dethroned from her Reno dominance by now local Ruth Gordon. Both were putting together impressive rides to beat out some of their peers such as Tanya Faux and Nikki Kelly. At the very end it appeared Emily was going to dominate once again when Ruth flushed during her final knockout ride and had a few tricks that may be questionable for scoring, however Emily flushed very early in her ride and could never regain her composure. No one was sure of who would win, except the event organizers who kept the results private until the award ceremony.

In the men’s class, a flurry of tricks and new combination’s were thrown. It was mind blowing to see how far people are going with their combos, the most impressive being a lunar orbit to tricky-whu thrown by Andrew Holcombe. Andrew appeared to have the most presence throughout much the morning and early afternoon, and many were pretty sure that he would win considering in Semi’s he scored a nearly 1400 pt ride. Nick Troutman was strong throughout and so was Stephen Wright, though Stephen proved to be the most consistent as well as consistently huge, his trademark in freestyle.

In the Jrs as usual, Dane Jackson and good buddy Jason Craig were predictably the top two with another up and comer Justin Stoner not far behind. In the end however, Dane barely edged out Jason, though I am sure many are thinking that Jason will be nipping at Dane’s heels this summer at the team trials and the world’s and Dane will have to work hard to not be overcome by the powerhouse that Jason Craig has shown to be.

Full results from the day are to follow soon, below are the top three from each class.

Women’s

1. Ruth Gordon

2. Emily Jackson

3. Tanya Faux

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jr’s

1. Dane Jackson

2. Jason Craig

3. Dustin Stoner

Click here to view the embedded video.

Men’s

1. Stephen Wright

2. Andrew Holcombe

3. Nick Troutman

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reno River Festival Men’s and Women’s Open

Christopher Wing — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:38:06 +0000

The format for the men’s and women’s competition on Friday was a combined two heats to move on to the next round where the finals would be a knockout series. The Reno River Festival saw recors numbers not only in attendance but in number of boaters entering the competition. The competition was stiff throughout the 6 hour day of sun and heat. Below is video of the top rides from the men and women. It was encouraging to see more than the top dogs competing with the possibility of moving on to the next day’s invitational. Top 3 results are below, these lucky few moved onto the invitational today. Full results to come.

Women

1. Jessie Stone

2. Erin Clancy

3. Diane Gaydos

Click here to view the embedded video.

Men

1. Eddy Hake

2. Luke Ricker

3. Billy Malesky

Click here to view the embedded video.

We are now live!

Christopher Wing — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:45:41 +0000

Cameras are rolling and we are tabulating the scores at the Reno River Festival… more video and updates are on the way. Coverage starts Saturday!

Click here to view the embedded video.