The winners of the 2011 annual Australian Canoeing awards have been announced. The Australian womens canoe team (Jess Fox, Ros Lawrence, Ali Borrows and myself) took out the Sportscene sponsored award 'Team of the year'. Well done on a fantastic season girls!

The 2011 slalom season has ended with mixed results. Unfortunately after paddling well through the heats and leading the field into the semi finals, my run fell apart with 3 gates to go as I rolled down the ‘Niagara’ drop and failed to make the finals.

Fortunately the Aussie girls had a chance for redemption with the teams event underway a few hours later. With a solid run Jess Fox, Ros Lawrence and myself claimed gold in the first ever womens canoe team event at a World Championships.

World Cup Final

The final World Cup for 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic starts today in under 2 hours! The Australian Womens C1 have been using the course here in Prague as a base for training over the past 3 weeks. I have finally started paddling my new Galasport Tilt which is amazing to paddle, super nice to turn and really stable. Today we have the heats for all categories including 24 wC1 racing off for a place in the semi finals with the finals to be held on Saturday. All results including live footage and TV coverage can be found on the Troja website.

World Cup 3 - Leipzig, Germany

This weekend will be the final week of racing for a while with the 3rd World cup being held in Leipzig Germany. The weather has been fairly kind to us so far, however the heavy poles have not been! Typically Leipzig weather is VERY windy so paddling with the weighted poles here has been extra motivation to paddle cleanly! The course is much faster in comparison to the water in L'Argentiere last week so it has taken a few days to become familiar with it. All race information including results can be found at the event website here.

Via Ferrata, France

After finishing racing on Saturday Kynan, Jaxon and I went and saw some of the gorgeous sights around L'Argentiere! Definitely a good way to do it!

Australia 1 2 3 at World Cup 2

For the second time in the history of WC1 Australia has taken a clean sweep in this class at an international level. Jessica Fox came away with the win closely followed by Rosalyn Lawrence in 2nd and myself in 3rd. The top section of my run was fairly smooth however I ran into some difficulty at a tough cross bow move in gate 11 and had to roll wasting some valuable time.

World Cup 2 - L'Argentiere

The format for this weekends racing is slightly different to the previous World cups with heats and semis being run today. A long course has been set so I imagine many people will take the opportunity to rest during their 2nd heats run. Results can be seen live here.

World Cup 2 on Australian TV!

This weekends World Cup in France will be shown in Australia on Foxtel via Eurosport. They will show 90 minute live coverage at 18:30 Saturday 2 July with 60 minute highlights on Sunday July 3 at 3am and 90 minutes on Monday July 4 at 17:45 and again on Tuesday 5th at 7.30.

Silver at World Cup 1

The weekend didn't start exactly to plan for me with my heats and semis leaving a lot of room for improvement! My first heats run was solid however included a 50 and my semi final run included everything from looping the boat to rolling on rocks. Luckily it was enough to get me through to the final where I was determined to lay down at least one good run for the weekend. It was a very enjoyable clean and fast run... losing the majority of time in a spin move that should have been done direct. It was enough for silver only 0.31 sconds behind Roslyn Lawrence of Australia and a nice margin of 11 seconds ahead of third place Katarina Macova of Slovakia. Today Kate, Ros, Kynan and Robbie race in the finals before we head off to the Australian Institute of Sport Italian training base this afternoon.

Tacen training

Final preparations are being put in place for the first of 4 World Cup races in 2011. Despite flooding at the beginning of the week, the course is now back to fairly normal levels which hopefully will remain steady for this weekends racing. Heats begin tomorrow for all classes with the finals for MC1, WC1 and MK1 on Saturday. All results can be found at the Solka website and you can also watch live via the ICF streaming.

Europe 2011

"I'm going on a summer holiday..." ... well not quite. We arrived in Zurich today to 12 degrees and rain. Not quite the summer weather i had envisaged! The trip over here was relatively painless thanks to an authentic Thai massage in Bangkok and a half empty plane to Zurich! So after 5 countries in 30 hours and another to add tomorrow we will arrive in Slovenia for our final preparations for the first World Cup for 2011.

Team Guinea is back online for 2011

Team Guinea is back for 2011! Chris and Scott and working, coaching and studying hard back in Melbourne for the winter while Leanne jets off to Europe for a summer of racing. The most recent Penrith Valley Canoeing race was the final preparation for those paddlers left in Australia before the World Cup series. Here you can view some footage of Leanne on both the Saturday and Sunday courses.