Kayaks prevail over surf

Press, 26 November 1982, Page 32

Kayaks prevail over surf

By

RAY CAIRNS

Geoff Walker, the New Zealand iron man champion, and all bis main challengers are unavailable for the New Zealand surf lifesaving team this season. .

Walker, of Waimairi, confirmed yesterday that he had advised the New Zealand selectors of his position, and also said he believed that Alan Thompson, Paul McDonald, Grant Bramwell and lan Fergusson were in the same positions for the same reason.

The other sport of the group, kayak racing, is the reason.

Surf lifesaving now seems to provide all New Zealand’s leading contestants in the sport which bears a close affinity to surf ski racing. Thompson, indeed, won two silver medals at the world championships this year (one of them with McDonald), while Fergusson had three sixth placings, one of them — the K 4 1000 m — with Thompson, McDonald and yet another surf competitor, Peter Duncan.

They were the four kayak paddlers at the world championships and those successes are bound to result in an even bigger team being sent away with the coach, Benny Hutchings (yet another old surf iron man) to next year’s titles.

Walker, a 1980 Moscow Olympic Games team member, wants to be part of the activity, which will also act as a build-up for the Los Angeles Olympic Games. “I’m definitely getting back into it,” he said, adding that a training camp at Rotorua just over two weeks ago had shown he had to do a lot of hard work.

The kayak team is to be selected on the week-end of February 19-20, a little under three weeks after the New Zealand surf lifesaving team returns from Australia — "a pretty important training period,” said Walker. The little group of kayak paddlers-surf iron men have dominated recent New Zealand iron man contests, with the exception of the 1980 win of David Conder, the Taylors Mistake man whb is overseas at present, anyway. So there is a great vacancy looming, and the one who should be more interested than anyone in it is Mike Bassett, the Otaki youth who had such an outstanding, career as a junior.

And of intense interest to the Spencer Park beach sprinters is the knowledge that Russell Hamlett, of Waipu Cove, the long-stand-ing national champion and representative, has had a leg injury which is responding very slowly to treatment. He might not be at full fitness for the Auckland trials on January 8 and 9.