After the pre season races the season highlights approached, Euro Tour, Swiss Championship and alot of Sup Tour Schweiz races. I will not go into deatail about every event, but a list of results will be attached at the end of this post.
Sainte Maxime:
The Euro Tour race in Sainte Maxime clearly showed me how much different it is to compete on the ocean compared to the lakes of Europe. I suffered a lot in the technical race, and in the longdistance I struggled keep the pace in the bumpy conditions, but in the end I was pretty happy with my results.
Lost Mills:
With the Lost Mills my first A-Race of the season came around. I did not train a lot of sprints but decided to compete in the 200m races on friday anyway. The competition was tough and without a real plan on how to tackle this short distance I did not really stand a chance, but I was happy with my time.
On saturday the big long distance race took place. Other than the previous years the race stayed on the small lake, and we had to paddle laps instead. The new layout of the course made the race much more dynamic and the beachruns in front of the crowd made for a little extra entertainment. I got a good start and found open water for the first 500m but then I got caught between two draft trains, with too much distance to both of them. At the first buoy I caught up to Alexander and Kai-Nicolas and started to chase the Belar in front of us. By the time I caught Belar, at the end of the first lap Paul Ganse caught up and we managed to take turns in pulling our little draft train an catching others. During the second lap we caught Branislav and Leonardo and started closing in on the strong group around Peter Bartl, Ole Schwarz and Peter Weidert. On the last lap we managed to catch Weidert who fell off the draft and we finished in a 5-10 men sprint from the last buoy. I finished 43rd, only 8 minutes behind the winning time, which means I caught up by 3 minutes compared to the last year.
Swiss Championship:
The week before the Swiss Championship in Pully I tried to recover from a cold I got from teaching SUP all the time in the bad weather we had in June. So I was concerned about how much I can trust my body and feared to hit the wall half way through the race. After last year’s 4 th and 5 th place finishes and all the top Swiss paddlers at the start it was set to be a tough competition.
In the morning the 14k distance race took place on a course with a lot of buoys, forcing the competitors to paddle in up-, down-, and side-wind. From the start of the 6 round course last year’s Swiss champion in the technical race, Hakim Dridah, set the pace high and I followed in his wake, we managed to keep a gap of a few boardlengths on the following two paddlers, both former Swiss champions too. After two thirds of the race the chasegroup managed to close the gap, setting up for a tight finish. It was only 1 lap before the finish that me and Hakim took the lead again from last year’s longdistance champion Peter Tritten. We broke the train again and managed to open a small gap. After the last stretch upwind we turned in direction of the beach and started our sprint to the finish line up the beach. I managed to stay in front and secured my first Swiss championship title!
The technical race in the afternoon had to be postponed by an hour, because of thunderstorms passing through, which gave all the participants a little extra rest before the start of the 5k. The course was laid out as a short stretch of up- and downwind outside of the port and a narrow passage into the marina with a small beach run. After the start the top 5 group set out for the first buoy and after the turn the three paddlers in front made a solid pack with Peter first, Hakim second and me in third. Peter managed to break away from us two and arrived first at the beach run, meanwhile I sprinted past Hakim on the way to the beach and managed to close the gap with a solid relaunch. For the remaining part of the race it was a fight for first and second. But due to the narrow course with very few possibilities to overtake and good tactics of Peter he managed to fight me off until the end, winning the technical race with me right on his tail.
With my 1st place in the longdistance and the 2nd in the technical, I also made the best overall result in the men’s category.
The next block of races will now be Zurich, Marotta, St. Moritz and Davos.
All results:
2nd Bise Noire Surfclassics Murten
43rd Lost Mills Long Distance
3rd Drachenbootfestival Meilen
2nd Toucan SUP Magadino
1st Londistance Swiss Championship
2nd Technical Swiss Championship
3rd Technical Race Fool Moon SUP Classics
3rd Race around Nidau