GSCC Club Championships 2024 – Slalom
The third and final event of our club championships is the slalom and it will take place on Sunday 14th July at 1:00pm. No prior experience is necessary and any boat can be used.
The event is FREE and there is no need to book in advance – just come along, give it a try and have a good time. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t compete in the sprint and marathon, there are slalom medals up for grabs! Plus a good result in two out of the three events in our championship can still be enough to be crowned champion in your age group!
Please, please, please support this event if you can!
We haven’t run a slalom event since 2019 and it takes us the morning to set up the course. Poles need to be erected on each bank and lines tensioned between them. We then need to thread retractable gates on each line. It takes us quite a while to set the course up so please support this event if you can, it’s great fun! Below is a shot of the course from a previous year. For a selection of photos from 2019 click here
What is slalom?
Slalom usually takes place on whitewater and it is an Olympic sport. Team GB usually do really well in slalom winning golds in 2012 and 2016, and silvers in 2020. Slalom can of course also be on flat water, as is our event. The rules are the same: Each competitor has two timed runs around the course which involves paddling between a series of “gates” (each gate is a pair of poles hanging down). You are penalised 2 seconds if you hit a post and 50 seconds if you miss a gate altogether. These penalties are added to your time. Only Your lowest time of your two runs counts. For Team Slalom’s website click here
Martin
