Canoeing/kayaking schedule and results »

Canoeing/kayaking

Overview Format Contenders The Team The Basics Venue Media

In these days of electronic timing, elite sport has become a game of centimetres, even millimetres.

Rarely has this been more graphically demonstrated than at the 1988 Olympic kayaking event in Seoul.

Australia's Grant Davies was initially awarded the K1 1,000 metres event. Davies had signed the gold medal register and was about to take part in the medal ceremony when, after 11 minutes of deliberations, judges decided to give the race to American Greg Barton.

They ruled the American had beaten Davies by just five one-thousandths of a second.

The reaction of Davies to the news highlighted another of the central tenets of the Games - sportsmanship.

Despite taking what most people would have regarded as a shattering blow, Davies reacted calmly, saying: "If this is the worst thing to happen to me, I will have a pretty good life."

So impressed was the Australian Olympic Federation with his attitude that it recommended a special sportsmanship medal be struck and awarded to Davies to recognise his adherence to the Olympic spirit.

Davies remains the only person to have been awarded such a medal.

Davies was competing in a single person kayak event (hence the K for kayak, 1 for one person branding of the event), but canoe events (the 500m and 1,000m C1 and C2), in which only men compete, will also be held under the same banner in Beijing.

In canoeing and kayaking, medals are awarded for both sprint and slalom, or whitewater, events.

Sprint events involve a race, in lanes, over a flatwater course. In contrast, slalom events take place in fast-flowing waterways with competitors required to pass through gates, some of them requiring upstream paddling, over a course which must be between 250m and 400m long.

While canoes and kayaks are similar craft, they have significant differences.

Kayaks are closed craft paddled from a sitting position, while canoes are open (except for in the slalom event) and are paddled from a kneeling position.

Sprint kayaks feature a foot-operated steering mechanism.

The paddles used in the two craft are also different. Canoe paddlers use a single-bladed paddle while those in kayaks have blades at either end of their paddles.

Like so many Olympic sports, canoeing and kayaking came to the fore in 19th century England.

Of course, kayaks have been around for thousands of years, constructed principally from whalebone and sea-lion skin by Inuits in the northern-most reaches of the Americas.

But British barrister John MacGregor is credited with bringing the craft into modern times when he designed a similar boat after studying those early prototypes.

The kayak caught on, and by the second half of the 1800s, canoe regatta had begun in England.

Flatwater canoeing and kayaking was first welcomed to the Olympic fold in Berlin in 1936, having been a demonstration sport in 1924.

At the 1936 Games, Canadian canoe, kayak and folding canoe events were contested, although the folding canoes sank without trace after Berlin.

Slalom events made their debut in Munich in 1972 on a custom-built course which cost a small fortune to build.

Although the sport proved popular with spectators, the cost of constructing a suitable venue meant the discipline disappeared from the Olympic program for two decades.

It was resurrected in 1992 in Barcelona, and has continued ever since.

The Australian Canoe Federation was formed in 1949, the impetus for its formation coming from the decision to award the 1956 Games to Melbourne.

Melbourne saw Australia's first foray into canoeing and kayaking and it also yielded the nation its first canoe-kayak medal.

Dennis Green and Wally Brown won bronze in the now discontinued K2 10,000m event. Green went on to represent Australia in five Olympic campaigns, a feat only a handful of other Australians have matched.

Since those days a series of surf lifesavers have made the jump to kayak paddling, including Phil Coles, former ironman champion Grant Kenny and gold medallist Clint Robinson, who will compete in his fifth Olympics in Beijing.