This year the season’s end took place in Czech with the final world cup events at Lipno and České Budějovice.
The race course at Lipno is infamous. This is partially thanks to the 1992 World Champs where 30 cumecs of water were dumped down a course that normally handles less than half of that. But, even with a sensible amount of water the course is big and steep. However there is another reason for its infamy. The river Vltava is easily the stinkiest river in Europe!
At Lipno the river releases out the bottom of a dam bringing with it the remnants of whatever has sat decaying at the bottom of the reservoir for the past eternity. The smell this releases is not too dissimilar to the smell released by standing in knee deep canal mud. Except, where the canal mud smell dissipates within a second or two, in Lipno there is no escape and the stomach wrenching smell saturates the valley encroaching on your every breath until you can no longer remember a reality without it. Needless to say, Riverstench felt right at home!
The last article I wrote on the previous world cups centered around the difficulty of learning a new course within a short timespan. Lipno took this to the extreme. Releases out of the Lipno dam only occur at paddleable levels one weekend every year. This not only makes learning the course hard, but it also ensures it’s very busy. Over this one weekend the river played host to not only the Wildwater world cups, but also the Czech slalom Championships, the devil’s extreme race and rafting world cups (which we had sadly neglected to enter).
There were 2 hours of water on Thursday and 4 hours of water Friday before the racing on Saturday and Sunday. Fortunately with Lipno being quite large, all of the rapids were quite distinctive meaning it only took a few laps to get to grips with the rough lines. Although again the headcams were invaluable for cleaning these up a bit.
One quirk of the course is that before the finish there are two long flat lakes you have to rag it over before the final and biggest rapid of the river pops up to sucker punch you just before the finish. This caught out Alex the previous time he’d raced here in 2018, leading to a lovely swim across the line. Getting the balance right between pulling hard across the lakes, but not so hard that you piss it in at the end was clearly going to be a challenge.
But for the Serbian team this would come with an extra complication. They’d been unable to make the Thursday and Friday practice sessions and in the morning of the 1st race the final rapid had been closed off for the rafting world cups. This meant they’d have to run the final rapid, blind for the first time in the race!
Fortunately one of the Serbs came up with a cunning plan. He’d ease up over the lakes, allowing Alex who started 30 seconds behind him to catch up. Then Alex could show him down the final rapid, avoiding catastrophe. Unfortunately the Serb hadn’t planned on Alex pissing it in again, which led to one of the team’s favorite photos in recent history.
Alex wasn’t the only one to have issues though, with Rob also making a similar mistake. For my part I also made a mess of the bottom, going right through the meat of everything, losing a lot of time, but fortunately not losing my boat.
Up until this point Czech had been an intolerably hot 30⁰C but after the first day of racing the clouds gathered so thick that the sun seemed to set early. The wind started picking up, threatening the marquees and attempting to steal our drying thermals. Then the torrential rain came. Over 2 cm within 2 hours transformed the campsite into a myriad of small lakes and rivers. We watched on from the van trying to make backup plans for when we’d discover that all our tents had been drowned.
Miraculously everything mostly survived, although any hope of dry canoeing kit was gone. Some of the french girls were even kind enough to come check on us. By the sounds of things they’d had an even tougher time than us as they were “completely soaked” and “had no clothes left”! But Alex sent them away as he was “already warm and dry”, curled up inside his sleeping bag.
The format of the world cups was a tad odd with Lipno hosting 2 classic races back to back on the same course and Ceske Budejovice hosting 2 sprints back to back on the same course. So having done it all on Saturday at Lipno, on Sunday we’d do it all again!
This presented a good opportunity to take the mistakes from the first race and apply the lessons from them to the second. In a rare moment for forethought I’d filmed my first race run which I then went over with Nicky later that evening. It turned out to be time well spent as, despite lower levels I managed to shave a few seconds off my time. Alex too made good use of the 2nd day, finally finishing a race run at Lipno.
After 2 solid days of racing the Czechs had organized a little party to celebrate the end of world cups 3 & 4. If there is one thing that the Czechs do better than paddling it is partying and the highlight of this party was definitely the alpine luge. An alpine luge is basically a metal half pipe that winds down the mountain. You navigate this sat upon a glorified kitchen tray on wheels with a single lever that operates the brakes. This was almost too much fun, particularly after a couple of beers, but what really transformed the experience was the speed trap at the end. Surprisingly if you allow a bunch of athletes to record their top speed things instantly turn into a competition.
With this being my primary motivation I decided that the break was likely redundant. My reasoning for this being that nobody would design such a contraption where my safety was wholly dependent upon my own competence and even if they did, they’d probably be reluctant to allow me on it after a few pints. What I had failed to account for is that I was not in Disneyland. A fact that became all too apparent as I hit the top lip of a banked corner and continued on down the pipe sans sledge. You’ll be relieved to know I survived the ordeal, despite leaving some skidmarks of my ego down the track.
The following morning we departed a grey and drizzly Lipno to arrive in an equally grey and drizzly České Budějovice. Earlier in the trip we’d been cunningly abbreviating this to simply ‘České’. This caused some confusion from the Czechs who later informed us that ‘České’ more or less translates to ‘town’ or ‘city’ in the context of a place name and what we were saying was more or less gibberish. Still, České has a Decathlon. And the Decathlon had new, but more importantly dry shoes and towels we could buy having failed to dry nearly everything.
České Budějovice, to use its proper name, was to host the next 2 world cup races. Both would be sprints, and both would be on the artificial white water course just outside of town. While the water outside of Budějovice was a lot less smelly it is renowned for being rougher on the belly. The Czechs had kindly warned us about this by lobbing bog rolls at our heads during the opening ceremony. Little did they know we train on the Trent, and thanks to the lackluster performance of British water companies are well used to swallowing sewage. Still we followed a near religious regiment of hand washing and stomach washing with copious amounts of coke, to a moderate success.
The white water course itself was like a compressed version of our local white water course. A little steeper, a little tighter and a little swirly-er. As someone who tends to lean more towards the Classics, I’d never spent too much time focusing on trying to tighten up a sprint run. But, having the two Sprint World Cups presented the opportunity to target this neglected area of my skill set. Unfortunately highlighted some deficiencies in my repertoire and after a few frustrating practices Nicky, our coach, settled on new mantra to rectify these issues. “Long, strong, straight”, which I think was mostly in relation to my paddling.
Sadly my race runs over the next two days were a little disappointing. A marked improvement from how I was paddling upon arrival to České Budějovice but a few small mistakes (and one large spin out) meant they didn’t quite live up to their full potential. Still over the two days the rest of the team put in some strong performances with Freddie winning the Czech cup race and Phil putting down one of his best ever sprint runs.
To close things off there was of course more partying, this time featuring a mosh pit and the local Czech ska-punk band. The a rainy 6am departure, for a rainy 23 hour journey home, to a rainy Nottingham. 10/10 would do again.
Overall the world cups provided a lovely close out to the 2023 season. Lipno is now one of my favorite paddling destinations and I hope we will be returning there soon. Meanwhile the lessons I learned at České Budějovice will hopefully form solid foundation my 2024. Now all that’s left to do is enjoy all of the regional and National races in the UK over the winter!
River Stench 