David travelled out to Bratislava to compete in the most important race of the 2011 season, the World Championships. Unfortunately, it didn’t go David’s way and the results were all decided in margins of less than a second.
Here’s David’s account, “The World Championships didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped, but fourth in C2 was still a very good result and I was so close to making the C1 final and having a chance to go for the medals.
“In the C1 semi-final I made a big time error at the top of the course and despite fighting really hard to put down a good run on the rest of the course it wasn’t enough to recover and I finished fourteenth. I was was surprised to have come so close to making the final with my time loss, as I ended up only 0.87 seconds off tenth place and a chance to compete for the medals.
“In C2 Richard and I put in a good solid run in the final, but narrowly missed out on the medals by 0.47 seconds. To be fair, we had been pleased with our performance and though we would have preferred a medal, fourth at the World Championships was still a great result”.
Despite the lack of medals, David’s (and Richard’s) performance was good enough to qualify boats for the GBR Team in both C1 and C2 in next years Olympic Games.
Summing up the event, David said, “Despite the disappointment of not quite getting the results I’d known I was capable of at the Worlds, the season has as a whole been a successful one. I’ve competed in five major races this year, the European Championships, two World Cups, the Olympic test event and World Championships. And to have won a Gold medal, two Bronze medals, three fourth places and have made four out of five finals in both C1 and C2 has been a definite step up from last year.”
Buoying his mood, David has just come back from Grandtully, where he took part in the Scottish Championships – and won!
He’s now able to take a breather, before putting a new training plan into action and getting stuck into hard winter training.