About 700 competitors have descended on the Indonesian island of Java for this year’s World Rafting Championship, showcasing the best of the extreme sport in a region where its popularity is on the rise.
Teams of rafters, almost all non-professional, slammed their paddles into fast-flowing rapids to battle through the Citarik River, surging past jungle-clad mountains.
Spectators stood on the shore amid palm trees, cheering as the six-person teams raced through furious white water, navigating skillfully past rocks and through slalom polls.
It is the first time the championship, which has been running in one form or another for more than 25 years, has been held in Asia.
“Definitely rafting is becoming more popular in Asia,” said Joe Willie Jones, president of the International Rafting Federation, which organized the event with the Indonesian federation. “Compared to a lot of the world, it’s a relatively new activity.”
While rafting is little known in Asia compared with other parts of the world, it is the Japanese men who are the only full-time professional team. The Brazilian men also receive strong financial support and are among the best, while teams from eastern Europe perform well.
Indonesia was named host after organizers put forward a competitive bid and the selecting committee decided the archipelago was suitably exotic, with its thousands of islands, vast tracts of jungle, and steaming volcanoes.
Rafting chiefs are always keen to host the championship in a far-flung part of the world to satisfy the adventurous spirits of those competing.
“We like to go to unusual, exotic locations, because it always makes the event interesting for the competitors,” Jones said.
However, it is not always easy for the non-professional athletes who want to participate.
“We’ve been fundraising for the last six months or so, just to get the money to come over here,” 41-year-old New Zealand competitor Mariam Audin said. “It’s not easy for everyone to fly over to Indonesia and pay for their uniforms, pay for their paddles, pay for our gear.”
There are four disciplines in the championship, which this year ran from Nov. 29 to yesterday, with male and female divisions competing across four different age categories.
The “sprint” is a short, fast dash; the “head-to-head” pits two teams against one another in a race; the “slalom” sees competitors steer their rafts through poles in powerful rapids; and the “downriver” is a race that takes close to an hour.
There is no single overall winner of the championships, but different countries are named winners in the different categories and divisions.
The men’s “open” category, where participants are aged between 15 and 40, is the most closely watched, with Brazil crowned the winners of the category this year.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier