C-Forum

The French, being French, are very good about putting out stylish video. This link is of Olympic and World Champion Tony Estanguet.

http://www.dailymotion.com/visited/sear ... u-monde-20

If you've ever been crushed at a race by the top US hotshots, its scary to realize how much faster Tony is then they are. Ouch!....edg

i have seen that video many times over the psat couple of months, and i don't think he takes an unneccessary stroke. anywhere. that course in prague looks like a really good time. I was going to go over and follow the world cup circuit, but I had to get a vehicle instead. would have been rad with Prague, Tacen, and Augsburg. lately, I have been watching more video of the augsburg course, it looks like a smaller less pushy charlotte. I am really excited to see an international level event held there.
Prost
-Isaac

I have watched that one a lot as well. Amazing....

I kind of like this one as well. Check out the offside roll.

http://www.atlwhitewater.com/Nationals.html

click on the C1 Finals.

Thanks for posting (especially the Charlotte one). I had never seen that Charlotte footage. Very interesting to watch, as I have been playing and replaying a mental video of my own runs down the course in my head since that August day. It was interesting to compare!

That first flush gate that you see the guys do at the top of Charlotte was really, really hard. So was the up deceptively hard just below the bridge where the camera person was filming. I just couldn't get the right angle on it, although coming down that drop with the crowd cheering was really fun. Gate 15, which you can see give Casey problems (the river right up, just before peeling out and heading over the last big drop) was also difficult. It's cool to see some of the guys nip in and out of there.

I wish Estanguet was there at Charlotte. I'd like to have seen him run the course!

By the way, happy New Year, all. If the Olympic Code is "Citius, Altius, Fortius," I've often thought the aspiring slalom boater's code should be - and I (perhaps mis?)adopted this from "Chariots of Fire" - "See them, live them, breathe them" - as regards the top boaters in the country and world. Best of luck to all in 2007!

Alden

yeah the ace video library is key. here is a link to the canadian national google video library
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid= ... ford+creek

that is the link to the Rutherford Creek project near Squamish where they are working on an artificial course, but there are a host of other videos in the scroll bar as well. alot are obviously candian paddlers, Cartwright, Allen are the C1. Julian Potvin Bernal is also a C1 junior, and Dawid Bartos is a Polish or perhaps slovakian who is a C1 Junior. I have competed against allen and needless to say, I was 'crushed'. I was going to write about that race, but I thought I better not...
anyhow,
Prost
-Isaac

and yeah that offside roll is really impressive, as well as that first gate at the top, Crane just accelerates through it.
Prost
-Isaac

WOW! Can you say, "Tony was fast?" He executed some really awesome moves. Made them look like it was kinda easy--like he was running class 3 stuff. BTW, I really like the first part of the footage where he is forward strokin' right towards the camera. It's a great view to see how he paddles so fast. I'm downloading the Charlotte stuff on my dial-up, so I have about another hour's worth of time for the completion. So far, that course says, "PUSH!" the whole way Kinda reminds me of the first part of the original Dickerson course.

KNeal

Cannot work out the gate configuration though.

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid= ... orts+canoe
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid= ... orts+canoe

Charlotte is just such a world-class course in so many ways, and in so many ways better than Dickerson. Take the warm up areas - at Charlotte you have this big, plush warm-up pool with room enough for a battleship to turn around in. Plus you can paddle down the wilderness/freestyle channel and have yourself a quarter-mile of class III rocking whitewater littered with eddies and waves and holes. What better way to warm up?

Whereas at Dickerson you have a soup bowl-sized starting area with surgy eddies that piss and moan back and forth while 13 boaters scramble to keep from getting sucked downstream as they attach their skirts and some poor stiff has to sprint through the start gate in the midst of all this!

Still, I am really getting to love Dickerson. I went paddling out there this morning. It's finicky and surgy and the walls are sharp. I pitoned yesterday on a boulder so hard my head snapped forward. Yet at the same time, there is such a pleasure in just putting yourself out in the middle of all this - essentially saying "Give me the hardest, surgiest, most boat-abusive 'river' you can, buried on the back of a nuclear power plant's property, and at the end of it all perhaps there will be the residue of skills and fitness that you cannot fake."

Happy New Year, everyone!

Alden

Just to nip a potential rumor in the bud...

The Dickerson power plant is fired by coal/natural gas/oil.

http://www.mirant.com/our_business/wher ... kerson.htm