About a month after the amazing challenge in Enschede, we departed for the Concrete Canoe Challenge in Köln. We had reserved our best canoes of the year to participate in the biggest event of the year. The race in Enschede had already shown us that we had some very good competitors and we knew that a victory at this European challenge would not be easy.
However, before we could start the race, it was imported that we discovered the course, the city and of course the Kölsch way of partying. When all the amazing parties were over, we could immediately go through with the events of the next day: the presenting of the boats. The mood at the event was very friendly, and chatting with all the teams about their canoes and innovations has been very insightful. In the rest of the weekend we continued with what might even be the most important element of the challenge: having a great time with all the teams.
But having a great time is not enough and can even be done without a canoe (looking at you, Delft ). We need to race! After some thrilling qualifying rounds and semi-finals, both our canoes made it to the finals. However the team from Leipzig, who had already proven to be a worthy competitor in Enschede (and lost there), turned out to be just a bit too strong in both the men and the women finals. Both competitions ended in the same result: first place for Leipzig, second and third place for us. We’d like to congratulate them on their victories, but we also want to say that the fight is not over yet.
The coming two years we will focus on improving our canoes even more and preparing our canoers even better, to recapture the title. We would like to thank our sponsors for supporting us during the preparations for the challenges and we hope that we can keep collaborating with them to improve our canoes. We also thank all the other participants of the challenge for the amazing weekend and the German Concrete Association for the well organised event.
We hope to see everyone back at the race in Germany in two years, and some of the teams at the event in Eindhoven next year, hopefully from the top step of the podium.
Check out pictures of this and other races here.