We are writing the present letter on behalf of the Hungarian canoeists that worry about and fear for their beloved sport. We would like to express our indignation in reaction to the events that occurred in the women's canoe race events at the ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships - Poznań 2010.
The appraised and traditional canoe sport has always been known for the enormous achievements of sportspeople, world classic racers, culminating battles, however, the moments of the women's race event resembling a kind of parody cast a shade thereon.
Representation of a professional branch experiencing a lack of appropriate professional bases and a mass base characterising its raison d'ętre in the program of the world championship has a damaging effect on this entire sport.
We would like to extract a few facts from the events that occurred:
C1
After Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards earning his reputation at the 1988 Winter Olympic Games a new hero was born in the person of the Angolan Fatima Antonio, who in the 200 metre elimination race could not get into the starting block even after trying for 15 minutes. It must be mentioned that alignment for the start meant a great challenge also for the other sportswomen. Similar scenes took place also for example in the B final of the 200 metre women's race.
C2
In the 500 metre canoe pairs race there were 5 units in total at the start. Apart from the winning Canadian pair that won with a 15 second advance before the field, the ladies practically cannot even canoe, which signalises the seriousness of the non-existing field.
Representation of an amateur level women's canoe sport of leisure time character at a world championship, beyond the professional sport objections, also endangers the course of other races since due to the above mentioned and long-lasting starting difficulties the entire program gets or might get upset.
The most read Hungarian sports newspaper Nemzeti Sport (National Sport) besides the bright Hungarian successes also dealt with the given case and published an article under the title "Fatima's tortures". We would like to quote now from this article:
"We do no aim to hurt the women's canoeists at any rate, and our apologies go to the exceptions, but what we saw in the battles of the event that was represented in the official world championship program for the first time, even gently said, provokes a smile on our faces...
...those that saw the elimination race of the 200 metre single race could take Fatima Antonio to their bosom. After five minutes the entire press centre was crossing their fingers as one for the pride of Angola to succeed in aligning to the starting block but when even after a quarter of an hour torture she could not accomplish the task, the starting referees had enough of it and they started the race of ladies. Everybody's Fatima taking the flying start came fourth so that two other racers were excluded. The sound of the starting sign found them balking in the middle of the racing field two-three meters from the start line."
Unfortunately such events undermine and deflate the results that ICF achieved for the past 5-10 years and which made the appraisal of the kayak-canoe sport grow and caused that the race events became broadcastable and enjoyable on television. We identify with the efforts of ICF aimed at making the races more colourful, but we would kindly like to ask you to reconsider what had happened and draw the appropriate conclusions.
Finally we would like to mention one positive event. We are glad that the efforts aimed at popularisation of the dragon boat sport brought about such excellent results owing to which the dragon boats of several dozen teams sail the Hungarian waters.
With our sport friend regards,
Special Kayak-Canoe Department of Merkapt Maraton Team SE
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