Varsities

Now that I've got all the work that I should have done at the weekend finished I might as well throw in a few details about what actually went down! Since the Polo was on Saturday we had to leave Limerick as crazy O'Clock in the morning, which meant meeting up on Thursday night to pack up everything. I've never seen such a variety of gear being loaded up for one trip before in my life! 2 trailers, 30-40 odd boats and lord knows how much paddles and other gear! I guess it doesnt help when you've got teams competing in Polo, Freestyle, Whitewater and something like 8 different classes in Long Distance.

For some reason this year they changed the format of the Polo competition. In the past it was run as a league to start off and then moved into semi finals and finals. This year it was a knock-out all the way, meaning that if you got a tough draw in the first round it could screw you over for the rest of the entire competition. Thats what happened to the team who were regarded as being the second best team in the competition, they came up against GMIT in the first round and that was the end of their polo competition. We didnt do as badly as that, we only came up against them in the second round, and lost miserably. We weren't too happy that we went out that early in the comptition but what can you do, we just had to do better in all the other events to make up for it!

  

The next morning the Whitewater event was run on the Clydagh, again at stupid o'clock in the morning. I stayed in bed and had a lie-in since I was competing in the Freestyle in the afternoon and this was my only event off but the lads came back saying that they weren't sure how they'd done but they thought they were pretty quick. They had one swim towards the end of the race, but so did every other team and since they had swam over the finish line that can only have been another advantage!

The freestyle that morning went really well! The water level at Tuam was awful but this was probably an advantage to us since none of us can stick moves like McNastys and Phonixes consistantly. As it was we played the score-sheet and went through all the fun moves before going for real moves, including attempting to stand up in our boats at the end for 50 points! As soon as we got off the water we knew that we'd scored well, and thanks to Adrian putting the results up on Irish Freestyle we found out that we'd come first in the event not long after. What surprised us was the margin we won by. We were 200 points clear of the next team, NUIG! I put together a video of the heat there in the last few days, check it out:


After the Freestyle the only competition that was left was long distance.This was supposed to be a 6km marathon but after problems with locations it got shortened to a 2km sprint. The classes for this were similar enough to the liffey descent. To get the most points overall we had people entered in every class but the specialist classes were very competitive with lots of people who paddle for Ireland in Wildwater and Marathon in them so we didn't really get any points from them. The less specialist classes were a different story tho! Barry and Niall were paddling the Duo, and Ethan and Oisin were in the Canadian and they won both of them! I was paddling in mens GP which was a huge class, with somewhere between 60 and 100 people racing. The race went really well and I was up around the front of the field for the whole race but was kind of disappointed to only come 3rd in the end after a good battle in the sprint to the finish.

At the awards sunday evening we found out that we had won the whitewater and fancy dress, as well as the freestyle that we already knew about. All this gave us 1st overall and a nice shiney new Molan to bring back in the back of the van! Delighted! Thanks to the lads that were in the club before us this is the 3rd year in a row that we've won the event so the drive back to Limerick was spent planning parties to celebrate the occasion and plotting world domination i.e. 4 in a row!