Scheduled Sessions and More Thrashings in Spain By Ken Whiting and Kevin Varette June 21, 2001 The organizing committee has announced that scheduled team training sessions will begin at 11:00am today. Based on team size, each country will be allotted a time-slot between 30 and 120 minutes during which the hole is exclusively theirs to train in. With over 25 countries being represented by teams of sizes varying from 2 to 40 athletes, the organization of these time-slots is not an easy task. It also means that training time is now very limited. For example, a country like Canada, which has 34 team members, will have no time slot today, one 90-minute slot on Friday and only one more 90-minute slot on either Saturday or Sunday. If the training session happens efficiently, each athlete should have between 5 and 6 rides before the competition - not many!! Anticipating this bottleneck is the reason why several athletes have been here for two weeks or more. The US team is the largest here and had a two-hour slot during the middle of the day. The water level was as high as we've seen it, creating an even bigger and bouncier Pit, but deeper and therefore more popular for throwing ends in. It provided some of the best throttlings to date! EJ, Wick, Dan Gavere, Jimmy Blakeney, Brian Kerk and Clay Wright were going off, along with Tanya Shuman, Brooke Winger, Whitney Lonsdale and the US junior squad - this is going to be a tough team to beat! Much of our time here is spent killing time, but it's not a bad place to have to do it! The town of Sort is beautiful just to walk around, sit on a patio for lunch, goof around in the hotel pools to stay cool (see clip of Fisher and friends!), play at the little wave upstream, go for a windy-road trip to the tax and duty-free country of Andorra about an hour away, or do like the Spanish and sleep half the day away! The guy at the dam control must have dozed off around midnight again and shifted the lever to "on" because the water came back up to a decent level. There has been no consistency to the water level whatsoever here!! About fifteen paddlers suited up for an early-morning session under the floodlight. Half of them were Canucks and the rest a jumble of Americans, Irish and Kiwis. It was an impressive show of cartwheels, cleanwheels, splitwheels big blunts, loops and of course more poundings in the Pit! It's going to be an interesting competition! Notes of Interest…. The poor Japanese team had their boats completely denied by KLM at the airport and find themselves here in Sort with three more days to go and no boats to paddle. They are trying to get some through British distributors in England. DON'T FLY KLM!!!! Aleta Miller, a top US female team paddler, has had to pull herself out of the 2001 World's because of an injury to her pectoral muscle. In most other holes, she may have been able to continue, but the size and power of this one made the risk of blowing her shoulder joint too great. Erica Mitchell-Blakeney will be showing up on Saturday to fill in for Aleta. Back to Worlds coverage

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