By Marc Woolward
Photos: Hugo Grassi and
Roger Aguirre Smith
Marc Woolward – England team member, current world number 3 Masters, 4x British Champion
Kayak Surf World Championships 2022
Surf kayaking is the sport where extreme whitewater kayaking meets surfing with the top athletes busting inverts, aerials, huge slashes, and tube rides at some of the most challenging surf breaks on the planet. It is also a sport where British athletes excel and where a small town in North Cornwall will be soon hosting our bi-annual World Championships.
For the past few decades, athletes have met every two years to crown the ‘World’s best’ in iconic locations from Australia to Costa Rica, California to Mundaka, and Scotland to Brazil. In the 14 events since the first World Championships were held in Costa Rica in 1995, a nation from the United Kingdom has placed either first or second on the planet an incredible 13 times. Currently, UK athletes hold 11 individual medal positions in the various world classes decided at the last World Championships held in Peru in 2019. In such an intense and competitive paddlesport, the UK’s athletes excel and regularly beat the world.
Surf kayaking is surfing sitting down, and while it is not a mainstream sport, you will often find kayakers testing their skills in the water alongside board surfers at any beach around the UK where waves are ridden. While surf kayaking can be easier to begin than learning to stand on a surfboard (because you can remain seated as you ride your first waves!), the skills required to conduct the most radical moves can be more complex, and the beatings more severe when things go wrong.
More difficult
This is because, unlike board surfers, it is harder for a rider to redistribute their weight while sitting and attached, and it is also much more difficult to duck-dive a buoyant kayak under large breaking waves. The skills required to generate speed on a wave, execute radical changes of direction, and navigate a path to the outside waves in large surf are challenging and require large amounts of skill and judgement.
At the World Championship level, contests are regularly held in surf conditions with faces in excess of ten feet where being in the wrong place can have serious consequences for the rider, craft, and equipment. Also, at this level, progression to the later rounds requires mastery of advanced skills such as the execution and completion of aerials where the rider and craft launch high into the air above the crashing lip and regain the wave with a clean landing.
The equipment is also highly specialised, with riders strapped into craft weighing under 7kg made from stiff, high-performance materials such as carbon and hull templates closely resembling surfboards with fins and channels designed to generate maximum speed and release into super radical manoeuvres.
Finally, unlike consistent standing river waves, almost every ocean wave is different, which means that careful wave selection is often crucial. The ability to read the dynamic conditions emerging on any ride can make the difference between success and failure.
World Championships 2022
In the autumn of 2022, we will be bringing the party to north Cornwall in the southwest of England. Bude Canoe Club will host the first World Championships ever to be held in England – although the English have been crowned World Champions on five previous occasions. The contest was originally planned for 2021, but due to the pandemic will now take place over ten days from 29th September to 9th October, 2022 and attract over 100 of the top competitors worldwide competing for world titles in 14 individual classes and a team competition.
‘surf city’
Bude itself has become the UK’s leading ‘surf city’ with many of the top UK surfers in all disciplines, including shortboard surfing making its debut at this year’s Olympics, long boarding, SUPing, body boarding and surf kayaking, calling the town their home. Bude is also home to several British and World champions in surf kayaking. The location is beautiful and can provide the very best surf conditions to test the world’s elite wave riders.
Our World Championships will also represent another first – the first environmentally neutral world championship in any surf discipline where we will eliminate the plastic waste and net carbon emissions associated with many global sporting events. Working with Bude Friends of the Earth and our environmental sponsors, we will be providing facilities for competitors to avoid food and packaging waste and establishing a community woodland where all carbon emissions associated with the event will be mitigated in an environmentally sensitive manner in a way that will benefit the local community for years to come.
As surfers and environmentalists who have travelled the globe searching for perfect waves for years, we have decided that it is no longer sustainable to pump hundreds of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every two years. We hope to establish a model for future international competition to become more sustainable and consistent with our love of the marine environment.
Aside from our environmental ambitions, we hope to hold an event that raises the profile of surf kayaking within the UK and showcases how spectacular this discipline of paddlesports can be. Leading up to the event, the England Surf Kayak Committee will promote development days around the country to encourage involvement in our sport, where members of our international team will be in attendance. And when the time comes, and the first waves roll into the 2022 World Championships of Surf kayaking, we hope we will be able to welcome new spectators and perhaps some new competitors taking to the water alongside the best in the world.
