NINA AND PETER IN GRAZ

After a fews day at home we are on the road again. Our first stop was in Graz. We came here on Friday and had two training sessions. I was quite worried about my back, but fortunately it seems to heal well, so I could go on fully. Friday evening the Graz kayak club invited everybody to their boathouse where they did a barbecue. It's their famous B&Q with awesome food and drinks where everybody was looking forward to.

Saturday was the day of competition. The hole had nice level. I was deep enough, strong and powerful. I ensure my way to final and saved the bigger moves for it. Peter had also nice rides. He did both prelim and semifinal at first place.
Afternoon all the finals took place. I had good rides and took first place. In mens' finals there was big concurrence. Guys were fighting hard but you could see some of them were quite tired from semifinal which was held before. I was watching them from the side and cheering for Peter. Peter and Bartos had awesome rides. Marcel as a home paddler also did good rides. We didn't know the results sooner as the final ceremony start. I wasn't surprised when they called my name for first place. Mens finals surprised all of us. Fifth place took Honza Spindler CZE, fourth was Marcel Bolder AUS, third place took Bartosz Cauderna PL, Peter was second and on the first place Tomas Andrassy SVK ended up. This was quite shock for us and also for some other people who was watching mens' finals. As I was watching the finals rides of guys I did order and it was quite similar except Tomas would be fifth and Peter first. I am not sure what happened and this did upset us.

I think this final wasn't judged fair and I am not only one who is thinking this. I used to judge quite often so I know that the work of judges is not easy and sometimes it is hard to decide if the move was right or not but I think this time it was quite clear. Some people can say that this was just small competition, nothing important but it is not true. If you train twice a day and try to do your best then you fell very frustrated when it has no effect just because of the unfair way of judging. This is quite big problem of freestyle and many paddler stopped to compete because of it. It is not hard to solve it because we aren't even in lack of good judges but of judges at all. But I don't want to write about this here. So we didn't break our curse once again and didn't stand together on the top. I hope we will break it soon because Europeans are coming. After Graz we went to Lienz to train for Europeans. The levels wasn't ideal and there was enough time between paddling. We take an advance of being in such nice nature as Lienz offer and did a few runs in between of training on the water. Now we are on the way home to have a rest again because now Peter's body is arguing. But Thursday we will be there again, training hard :)

See you

Nina