Another team gold for Edinburgh University student Eilidh Gibson offered ample consolation for Scotland's canoeists following an unprecedented and totally unexpected failure for triple world champion and three-time Olympic medallist David Florence at the European Slalom Championships in Tacen, Slovenia yesterday.
Florence will take no further part in the championships after wasting two chances to qualify for Sunday's C1 semi-finals, but Crieff's 2013 gold medallist Fiona Pennie eased through third-quickest in the K1 kayak heats before Gibson provided the highlight of the day in the C1 team event.
As in Slovakia last May, the Great Britain squad of Gibson, Mallory Franklin and Kim Woods proved too strong for their rivals as they finished four seconds clear of their nearest challengers Germany.
“You can't complain about that!” smiled 21-year-old Gibson in a masterstroke of understatement. “It's really cool to have retained our title from last year. We were under pressure as the defending champions, but we got the job done again.
“That's given me another run down the course and a bit more confidence for the individual C1 semi-finals on Saturday.”
Florence has a well-deserved reputation for delivering the goods when it matters, so there was surprise when he was not among the top 15 qualifiers on his first run. His time of 103.25secs was quick enough, but a two-second penalty for rattling a gate left him down in 21st place.
The 34-year-old was fully expected to claim one of the additional five qualifying spots on his second attempt, but he was never on the pace and finished well out of contention in 11th place.
“That was a long way off what I'm capable of,” admitted Florence. “Things didn't go well on either run, to be honest. To go from winning the Australian Open (in February) to not even qualifying here is not exactly the ideal start to the season. Hopefully the rest of the summer will be better as we head towards the World Championships in September.”
Pennie had no such problems in her qualifying bid, going clear in 103.68, which only two others led by the wonderfully-named German Ricarda Funk managed to better.
The Scot returned later to help Britain to a sixth-place finish in the K1 team event, won by hosts Slovenia, while Roslin's Bradley Forbes-Cryans was also sixth in the men's team final. He will be back on the water today in the individual K1 semis.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here