Best medal haul celebrated

GIRL POWER: The New Zealand women’s K4 500-metre team of (from front) Lisa Carrington, Kayla Imrie, Aimee Fisher and Caitlin Ryan power through the water to the silver medal.

CANOEING

New Zealand celebrated their finest medal haul at an ICF Canoe Sprint and Paracanoe World Championships regatta by banking a gold and a silver on a thrilling final day of action at Montemor-o-Velho in Portugal.

Lisa Carrington powered to a sixth successive world K1 200-metre title to retain her iron-like grip on her speciality event before the New Zealand K4 500m crew of Carrington, Kayla Imrie, Aimee Fisher and Caitlin Ryan took a valiant silver, finishing an agonising 0.01 of a second behind world and Olympic champions Hungary.

The two medals won so far on the final day added to silver medals banked on the two previous days by Carrington in the K1 500m, Carrington and Ryan in the K2 500m, Fisher and Imrie in the K2 200m and para-canoeist Scott Martlew in the KL2 200m. This eclipses the previous best medal haul of four at the 2017 edition in the Czech Republic.

Carrington, who had secured the previous seven global titles in the K1 200m with five straight world titles and two Olympic gold medals, was the overwhelming favourite to make it No.8.

However, few could have predicted her level of dominance and stunning victory margin of more than a boat-length.

Racing into the lead from the outset, Carrington held a lead of three-quarters of a boat-length by the 100m mark. Her nearest pursuer then was Linnea Stensils of Sweden.

For the remainder of the race, Carrington put on a demonstration to further destroy the field and stop the clock in 38.821 seconds. Emma Jorgensen of Denmark, who repeated her silver-medal effort in the same event at the 2017 World Championships, finished a distant 1.727s down, with Stensils (40.585s) in third place.

Carrington then returned with her crewmates in optimistic mood, having led the qualifiers for the women’s K4 500m final. However, the Hungarian crew — with five-time Olympic champion Danuta Kozak, who was hunting her third gold of the regatta — would be formidable opposition.

The Kiwi boat got away to a fantastic start and held an advantage of just under a quarter of a second at 250m, before the Hungarian crew applied the blowtorch to draw level in the final 100m.

In a captivating climax, both boats flashed across the line seemingly together, only for the Hungarians to be given the photo-finish verdict by one hundredth of a second in 1:33.761.

For Carrington, personally, it was her fourth medal (one gold, three silver) of the championships.

A successful regatta for New Zealand was brought to a conclusion by Quaid Thompson and Ryan in the 5km events.

Ryan, who won silver medals in the women’s K2 500m and K4 500m, narrowly missed out on a third medal, finishing fourth in the women’s 5km in 24:25.572.

The North Shore paddler finished more than 23 seconds adrift of gold medallist Lizzie Broughton of Great Britain and a little over 10 seconds shy of the medal dais.

In the men’s 5km event, Gisborne paddler Thompson placed 18th in 23:22.055, behind gold medallist Fernando Pimenta of host nation Portugal in 21:42.196.

Canoe Racing NZ chief executive Tom Ashley said of the New Zealand performance: “They’ve been amazing and it says a lot for the work that this group of athletes and coaches have put in to produce a best ever world championships medal count.

“One of the most impressive facts to consider is that we are working with such a small talent pool of athletes compared with many other nations, and punching well above our weight. We saw some incredible racing across the regatta, and we were just a little unlucky to miss out on gold to some brilliant teams in three races by less than five hundredths of a second.”