Two more Tauranga paddlers are off overseas to take on the world's best following the eight who are in New Zealand teams to compete at this year's World Canoe Slalom Championships in Prague.
Sprint kayakers Sam Roy, 17, from Otumoetai College, and Tarris Harker, 16, from Mount Maunganui College, are on their way to Prague, Czech Republic, for four weeks to train and compete at the Czech National Championships from July 19-21 before they take on the best young sprint kayakers at the 2013 ICF Junior World Kayaking Champs in Welland, Canada, from August 1-4.
They are racing individually plus doing the K2 200 together and Roy is also part of the four-man K4 4000 team. The two had their first interna tional competition in March as part of the NZ Sprint Kayak team that raced in Australia for the GP3 regatta.
But this is a huge step up for the two multi-talented athletes, who both have strong surf life saving backgrounds, and they have realistic goals of trying to make the final together in the K2 in Canada. The Australian regatta was a huge learning curve for them.
``Just the range of competition we had. In New Zealand, it is quite a small bunch of people paddling, whereas over there we had eight heats compared to our three,'' Harker said.
``So in Canada, the biggest thing is going to be the larger quality of paddlers.''
Roy and Harker are coached by Tauranga-based international pad dler Scott Bicknell, who has created a training programme specifically for the build-up to the world champs.
``It has been quite interesting training them and I have helped out with their high performance camps as well,'' Bicknell said.
``This is their first worlds and there is a philosophy with high performance that when you go to win an Olympic medal, you have to have been to your first Olympics before you can perform at your next.
``So it is all about experience and the same thing applies to worlds. We want them to get there, get some experience, but we don't expect them to be winning gold medals just yet. They need to get the skills because the European stage is intense and very competi tive. There are 90 countries that compete at kayaking.
``(Roy and Harker) definitely have the basis of really good technique and their balance is there, so it is really good funda mental building blocks from which to perform.''
Bicknell is club development officer for Bay of Plenty Surf Life Saving and sees a strong co- relation between Roy and Harker's surf lifesaving skills and kayaking ability.
``The vast majority of high performance athletes who have come through kayaking have all been involved in surf. Ben Fouhy is the only one who actually hasn't.
``It is a combination of physical conditioning, technique and strength. The core movement competency skills that you learn in surf lifesaving are pretty similar, so [they] definitely translate into kayaking,'' Bicknell said.
Last summer, Roy was the youngest captain of a surf boat crew at Mount surf club. He says that experience is invaluable to improving his leader ship skills in the kayak crews he is racing with.
``It definitely helped as you learn to work as a collective team instead of individuals and it helps in a team boat with four of us. As captain of the patrol, you listen to others in your team boat and I think that is pretty important.''