Racice,  Sprint World Championships.

It wasn’t until the first race that the true scale of the British men’s k4 teams’ mistake became apparent. That scale being precisely 1k.

In an interview given before the race, team captain and ‘person who steers the boat’, Matthew Robinson, said that they had been taking the event ‘very seriously’ even going as far to continually walk directly behind each other so that they could ‘continually work on their timing’.

Moving down the line, 2nd man Stelian Naftanaila, confirmed this adding ‘we even sat behind each other on the plane over. When asked for a comment 3rd man Lewis Fletcher  said ‘sleeping arrangements have been, awkward’, staring off blankly into the bald patch on the back of Naftanaila’s head.

While we here at river Stench find this level of commitment admirable, experts speculate that this intensive regime may be the reason that they failed to show up to the world championships with a fourth man.

‘I’m sure we always had four people before?’ remarked Robinson after the crew failed to reach the start of their race. However, further questioning revealed that none of the three paddlers were certain who is supposed to sit in the 4th and final seat of their boat. Naftanaila was confident that who whoever the mysterious member is that; ‘they are probably a dude, I think’. While Fletcher explained that the normal K4 procedure is to stick the ugliest most ‘Shrek’ like paddler in the back and the best looking paddler in the front ‘you know, for all the photos. So there’s no reason you’d want to look back there anyway’. He then hastily added that; ‘we obviously didn’t do it in our boat though. Otherwise I’d be at the front.’

A British Canoeing statement released on the event stated ‘this totally  has nothing to do with years of failing athletes and putting the quest for medals before everything else, including things like education.’ The statement continued: ‘All of our athletes are perfectly capable of doing normal people things like naming farm animals and counting to four. The very notion that a K4 team could put in months of training and preparation without realising there were only three of them is quite frankly preposterous.’ We asked a British Canoeing representative if it wasn’t more likely that they had just ‘accidentally left an athlete at the airport or something’, to which the responded: ‘Well obviously that’s what’s happened, very embarrassing we know. Ha-ha silly us. Clearly we have already dispatched a taxi to go get the missing athlete’ before running away, arms flailing.

Despite  this embarrassing incident the World Championship has so far been highly successful for British Canoeing’s Sprint arm, with all of the athletes remembering to go to boat boat weighing and some even making the B-finals. Basking in the limelight of their success so far another British Canoeing statement said they were  ‘very proud’ of all their athletes who are ‘focusing on the process’ and remembering to take their boats to boat weighing. ‘ We have some very ambitious plans for later in the week: We are aiming to keep our WK4 within the correct lane!’

We here at River Stench wish all of the British Canoeing’s sprint athletes the best of luck in the remaining day of the competition, especially to Ralph Beardmore, Kay Ward and their dog in the C2+dog

Have we gone too far? Have sprint paddlers not gone far enough? Let us know by leaving us a like, comment, or nail bomb.