I have been looking forward to today for a long time. We have tickets to canoe slalom – an event that we have not seen since Sydney, when Sean was 18 months old. We did have tickets to see it in Beijing in 2008, but a huge thunderstorm forced the organizers to scrub the event for the day. Then they rescheduled it for a day that we already had tickets for something else. So it has been a long time! Unfortunately, Sean will not be joining us. He reported that the dinner the night before had given him the French version of Montezuma’s revenge and was not going anywhere that was not within a few seconds of a toilet. Since the event doesn’t start until mid-afternoon, I work on my pin project, and we have a leisurely breakfast.
Like most recent Olympics, the French decided to build a white-water stadium rather than conducting the event on a river. But there is no room in Paris for such a huge venue, so they built it in the town of Vaires-sur-Marne about an hour east of Paris. This will be the furthest away from our Airbnb we’ll have to travel, taking Metro line 4 from Montparnasse to the Gare d’Est (Train station of the East) and then for about an hour on RER P to Vaires-sur-Marne. Everything goes smoothly and we have a walk through the town to the White-Water Arena. I’m getting a little bit of the Atlanta 1996 vibe because the locals have clearly geared up to make some money off of the Olympic tourists with popup restaurants and bars along the way.
I’m more interested in seeing what a small town in France looks like. Here are some pictures:
We have plenty of time, so when we enter the venue,
Beth gets in line to get us some water. While in line, she meets a guy who rode
his bike across Germany and France to reach this venue, has tickets for all
five days of the slalom events and then will ride home again. That is
dedication! I wonder whether he brought a tent and is just camping out between
events.
Here is a panorama of the venue:
I really like these artificial stadiums. The
organizers can change the water flow and by moving around heavy plastic blocks, can actually
change the geometry of each of the rapids, and there is much less variability in the run between athletes in each heat than you would get on a river. Competitors come up a “kayak escalator”
into a waiting pond and then start their runs clockwise from the right. We are
pretty far up in the stands but have a decent view of 5 gates; downstream
gates 4, 5, 6 and 7 followed by upstream gate 8. Upstream means that you have
to go past the gate, turn around and go against the flow through the gate
before turning around again and going downstream. This is one of the key
sections of the course so we should get some good views. Today is kayak slalom,
which means that the athletes use a double-bladed paddle, strokes alternating between left and right side of the boat to steer the kayak. The object is to propel your kayak down
the course as fast as possible while navigating the 23 gates. The gates are poles
suspended from above the course. Hitting a gate is a 2 second time penalty and
missing a gate altogether is a 50 second penalty. We’re getting both the
semifinal and final today. The 20 semifinalists get one run and the fastest 12
get a second run in the finals.
The French fans are excited because one of their
athletes, Titouan Castryck had the fastest time in the preliminaries by more
than 3 seconds. But after the semifinal run, Castryck is only in 3rd
place trailing Joseph Clark from Great Britain and Noah Hegge of Germany. It is
still really hot so at the break, I go out to fill my thermos at the free water
dispenser. While there, a guy from Slovakia hands me a card with the two Slovak
team pins for Paris attached!
In the final, as the final qualifier, Pau Echaniz of
Spain, goes first and drops his time from the semifinals by more than 7
seconds. His time was 88.87 seconds despite a 2 second penalty. That time stood
up for 4 athletes until Giovanni de Gennaro from Italy beat it with a time of
88.22 seconds. Hegge hit two gates to get knocked out of contention and then it
came down to Castryck and Clark in the final two runs. The French went nuts
when Castryck passed the second split time 2 seconds ahead of everyone else,
but he had some problems at the bottom of the course and ended up with a time
of 88.42 seconds to move into 2nd place and guarantee himself an
Olympic medal. At this point, we decided that the French fans would stay for
the medal ceremony and if we left now, we would beat almost everyone back to
the train station. As we were leaving, Clark completed his run in 89.82 seconds
and finished 5th and the French fans celebrated their silver medal.
Leaving a bit early worked perfectly as we were able to catch the first train out and were able to sit down for the ride back to Paris. It was about 7 PM when we got back to Montparnasse. We stopped at a pharmacy to get some stuff to help Sean and then decided to takeout pizza from the place next to our Airbnb so that we could watch Olympic coverage while eating. Here are some pictures from this event:
Steps for the day: 16,869.
No comments:
Post a Comment