Cork Rodeo Report

The Cork Rodeo - event 3 of the National Freestyle League competition was held on the 8th August at the Sluice on the Lee Fields. We'd spent the week before on the phone - to the council, the ESB, various shops for prizes, and anyone else we could think of! We all arrived that morning a little apprehensive - as the feature had only been "fine tuned" the night before, noone knew for sure how it was gonna turn out. The Sluice at various combinations of tide and river levels can be anything from a big flushy wave to a nasty pourover. Luckily we seemed to get the combination of dam release, tide times and wooden wedge just right to form a nice friendly hole... phew! :-)

On the day we got lucky with the weather. Blue skies and sunshine all day, after a week of damp soggy weather. The turnout was good from all corners of the country, with over 30 people showing up to compete.

Junior Men were up first. This was one of the bigger classes - always good to see as these guys are the future of our sport. After some initial uncertainty (none of them had ever paddled in this feature before) the guys got stuck in, and everyone did themselves proud.

After the Junior Men it was the turn of the Mens Sport. Most of this lot were from local clubs UCC and CIT, with some visitors from nearby(!) WIT, UL and Belfast, and I'm glad to say the old college rivalries are still alive and kicking! Some of these guys are definitely ready to move up into Expert class for next year, with some quite high scores.


Next up - all the ladies. Unfortunately we didn't have enough entries for separate heats, so Juniors, Sport and Expert were all lumped into one. Embarrassing for me as the Juniors showed me up, as did the Sport class. Good fun all round tho, and great to see some new faces on the competition scene, hopefully we'll see more ladies in the near future.


After the ladies it was time for another underrepresented class - C1. This has traditionally been quite a small niche sport in Ireland, but hopefully the sight of three willing and able participants to showcase their sport here is a sign of good things to come. We'd also had enquiries about the possibility of running a Squirt class but unfortunately the feature didn't allow this.


And finally, the Mens Expert class, or the "Battle of the Brothers" as it became. Local advantage could really be seen now, with these guys pulling off moves noone else thought possible in this fickle spot. The top places all went to locals with years of experience, and in the end it came down to one move in the points difference between 1st and 2nd, with Mickey taking a hard fought victory from his older brother Brendan.



So that's it over and done with for another year. A huge thanks goes out to the small army of helpers who helped the whole thing to come together so smoothly, also to all the prize sponsors, and the main sponsor of the event Munster Dive and Canoe, who provided everything from an air horn (improvised from a diving tank) to chairs (stolen from the shop) to vast cups of tea.
And of course thanks to Brendan and Donie for the photos I've used here :-)