Ricarda Funk gave the German slalom canoeists a dream start at the home World Championships in Augsburg. The Olympic champion confidently led the women’s kayak team around Elena Lilik and Jasmin Schornberg (all Augsburg) to the gold medal in the first competition of the title fights on the 1972 Olympic course. Ultimately, the flawless trio of the German Canoe Association (DKV) won with a lead of 2.48 seconds over Slovenia. Poland came in third.
“It’s cool that all three drivers hit everything like that. I don’t know when I’ve experienced that before,” said Funk, who was impressed by the atmosphere: “The spectators are fully behind us, we can rely on that.” Lilik from Augsburg, surprise world champion last year in the Canadian, felt pure relief: “I felt a bit sick, I was super excited. You don’t want to make mistakes in a team. That was the best team run we’ve ever done.” It was a golden comeback for former world champion Schornberg, who gave birth to a daughter in November 2020.
“On the brink because of the climate crisis”
The holding of the first home world championship in 19 years was questionable because of the low water in the Lech. World Association President Thomas Konietzko recently said that it was the first championships “that are on the brink because of the climate crisis”.
The so-called ice channel had too little water in the past few days and even had to be closed for training. Only a temporary wall with concrete pillars and wooden beams built into a side arm of the ice canal provided the necessary backwater so that the required 10,000 liters of water per second could flow through the canal.
“From our point of view, there is a catch,” said Johannes Heiss, the World Cup project manager for the city of Augsburg, on Monday: “We are very, very, very confident about the competitions. The feedback from the athletes is also such that it suits everyone.”
The weather conditions are also helping: rain is expected again and again in the coming days. However, there is still “a small unknown”, said Heiss, “we can only ever make two-day forecasts”. If necessary, another water reservoir would be available with the Forggensee.
50 years after the Olympic Games in Munich, the world’s first canoe slalom stadium has been renovated for 21 million euros. The title fights last until Sunday. The preliminary heats are scheduled for Thursday and Friday, before the decisions in the individual and in the extreme slalom, which will be Olympic for the first time in 2024, are made at the weekend. In addition to Ricarda Funk and Elena Lilik, Sideris Tasiadis and Hannes Aigner are also among the favourites.
