Canoe Slalom: Campbell Walsh missed out on London but is making waves in Glasgow

Saturday 7 July 2012

CAMPBELL WALSH may come to feel as though he is drifting without a paddle next month.

Campbell Walsh won silver in Athens but missed out on a third Games. Picture: Getty Images

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Chris Tait

A veteran of the last two Olympic Games, the Scot had planned one last tour of duty with Team GB this summer only to fail narrowly to qualify for London; the advanced stage of his career dictates that he will be unable to add to the silver medal picked up in Athens eight years ago. Walsh will turn 35 later this year and intends to retire from canoe slalom at the end of the season.

It is a capricious pursuit. The twilight of his career sparkles with medals won at European and world events – Walsh won the World Cup in the K1 discipline a month before claiming silver in Athens – but the technical demands of the sport, as well as the desultory nature of a course, mean that success can often prove difficult to maintain. Form and reputation can be capsized as easily as any competitor.Scots have proven more adept than most, though; David Florence will compete in both the C1 and C2 disciplines in London and has recently been confirmed as world No.1, while the British team which will compete at the Junior World Championships in Wisconsin next week is replete with aspiring Scottish talent. That is all the more impressive given that they are left to train on natural courses, although Port Dundas on the Forth and Clyde Canal in Glasgow has been proposed as the location for Scotland's first artificial circuit.That stricture played a part in Walsh choosing Nottingham – home of the UK's premier paddlesports centre – when it came time to decamp to university, from where he launched two successful bids to claim the solitary K1 spot available at the 2004 Games and again in Beijing four years later. "We have it really tough in canoe slalom as a sport – if you can imagine in the 100m having just one Jamaican athlete and just one from the USA, it's not right," said Walsh, speaking at the Port Dundas site where the Pinkston paddlesports centre is to be built."I very narrowly missed out on that one spot [this year]. That is pretty disappointing as, in general, I have been No.1, but the sport is all about competing when it matters and I didn't quite get it right. "A lot of people from other sports, who are more certain of becoming consistent and repeating a performance, think we must be crazy to do it. But that is part of the appeal as you go into an event – maybe you are the 10th-ranked guy there, but you can still win it."Walsh's frustration that he is not able to negotiate a historic third Games in canoe slalom is evident. He may have accepted the realities of age, but the ardent competitive instinct that propelled him this far will not be easy to placate. It could, though, be channelled into support for those canoeists that are representing Team GB, a squad whom Walsh believes will be in contention for medals. Florence, perhaps not surprisingly given his lofty ranking, possesses the best chance of claiming gold, while home advantage should not be discounted, either."There are no guarantees, but in canoe David is there or thereabouts, the top five in world-level events," said Walsh. "On the Lee Valley Olympic course is the style of water that really suits his style. He has trained there and the GB team are actually based there. They are very strong medal contenders again this summer."Future Olympic hopefuls could come to be based in Glasgow. That is, if the construction of the Pinkston centre is put in motion before the design is replicated elsewhere. "The design they have come up with is called the 'Glasgow design'," said Stewart Pitt, an Olympian and director of both Scottish Canoe Association and Glasgow Watersports. "They designed it specifically for this site, but the Russians are interested and they are looking at four sites to put it up, so it is kind of a race between us and the Russians to see who can build it first."

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Canoe Slalom: Campbell Walsh missed out on London but is making waves in Glasgow

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