(For part 1 click here)

In the early 2000s, it started to go wrong.

With the natural limitations in innovation almost reached, the advantage of being an athletic adventurer, rather than an adventurous athlete, began to diminish. The door was opened for the pointy headed geek obsessive to prevail with their soulless practice and repetition of what they knew would win competitions. At every event, more people appeared who had never battled tigers in the Hindu Kush, wrestled bears in California, women in New Zealand or anacondas in the fetid jungles of South America. The dullards had come: And they would win.

Alongside the implications of development maturity within the sport, its ability to hold the rest of the paddling world’s attention began to wain – interest in watching a man spin on his head 30 times can only be sustained if one has a hope that on the 31st rotation something extraordinary could occur. The question began to be asked within the sport, what could it do to hold or increase its position?

The dullards (adventurous athletes) argued themselves purple that the sport needed to be more accessible to the media and more professional. The diminishing band of athletic adventurers proposed that the sport needed to travel to some far flung corner of the world, somehow, where there happened to be a humongous great big wave, where, if a man were going to spin on his head 30 times at least he would be doing it ‘large’ while also manfully dealing with dysentery. Diarrhea and 36 hour bus trips, bouncing amongst the reek of chickens and unwashed humanity, is not something that the organisational types within the dullard contingent generally favour and as a result they came up with a million (crap) reasons why it would not be a good idea. The dullards won – it was inevitable.

A succession of minding bogglingly dull World championships followed, which motivated the adventurer types to dust off their creek boats and do something more interesting instead. This final exodus of the original participants sealed the fate of competitive freestyle. When the International Canoe Federation (ICF) came calling, there was essentially no one left to say no.

The ICF is the organisation that has administered disciplines such as slalom and white water racing since time immemorial. The rules of those sports were essentially set before I was even born. It institutionalises torpor and had every promise of doing the same to freestyle: it is a body wholy unsuitable to dictate how a sport whose future in not yet certain runs itself. The ICF is committee led and even less accountable to the sports it represents than the body that at that time administered freestyle. What the ICF wants, it gets.

The ICF promised the dullards money, international recognition and status. Some of the dullards had got it into their big fat heads that freestyle was Olympics material and as such alignment to the ICF was the appropriate course to take: so they took it.

It wasn’t providing money that was top of the ICF’s priorities for freestyle. One of its first actions was to start a programme of drugs testing the ‘athletes’ at competitions. Drugs testing freestyle paddlers should be held in the same contempt as the police turning up at Abbey Road while the Beatles recorded Revolver. Creative types are attracted to risky activities, which includes drugs (recreational). It might not help their performance but it’s part of who they are.

Although going to the wave with your mates for a session is still great, the dullards have steered the competitive sport of freestyle into a backwater from which it will never escape. It’s now even less interesting than slalom to the vast majority of the paddling world. The public at large, if they were to ever see it, would probably try to throw a rescue belt at the ‘athlete’ fearing they were drowning or having a fit (or just failing to paddle upstream). The hey days of limitless innovation are long gone and if the dullards and their descendents ever do find themselves wrestling tigers in the jungle somewhere, no one is going to care.