A prevailing wind at their backs is always a good thing for members of the Sudbury Canoe Club sprint kayak team – though it wasn’t a requirement for success as the crew competed at the Western Ontario Divisional Championships in Welland last weekend.
Posting a time of 2:08 in the U14 Men’s K1 500m final, into a head wind, Aiden McKinley was thrilled with a silver medal performance, though he has not discounted the possibility of climbing to the top of the podium at provincials in two weeks, having finished just two seconds back of the race winner Aaron Young (Mississauga) in the preliminary heats.
“My best time is a 2:06 with a tail wind,” added McKinley, a 13 year-old who will enter grade nine at Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School in September. “Welland is quite a good race course, most often with a tail wind. Here (Ramsey Lake), you can get a great tail wind sometimes and get down around two minutes.”
A competitive paddler for the past three to four years, McKinley upped the ante last summer, continuing to train six days a week during the winter and bumping that to ten sessions weekly for his current summer program. That said, the transition from the off-season gym workouts to the on-air water training is not completely seamless.
“At the start of the season, you’re usually a bit slower,” said the young man who also placed 5th in both the U14 Men’s K2 500m final (with teammate August Zhao) and the U14 Men’s K4 500m final (with Emma Chauvin and Poppy Horn jumping aboard).
“You haven’t been in a boat forever and your technique is pretty bad,” McKinley continued. “But after the first week and a half, you realize how much faster you are from last fall.”
McKinley is currently nursing a back injury that kicked in at the conclusion of the regatta, the by-product of some posture issues in the boat that the young paddler has struggled with from time to time.
“It’s important to be straight up, with big chest, rotating properly and bringing my right hand up every time for a stroke,” he said. “The shoulders are back and down. You’re sitting straight and leaning forward with an arch in your back.”
Still, he remains confident of his ability to be ready for the Ontario showdown, back in Welland on August 16th and 17th. “This is my third year at provincials – but it feels better because the last couple of years, I wasn’t as fast.”
“Now I know I have a chance of finishing first.”
Teammate Emma Chauvin is also relatively new to the fold, having been introduced to paddling in the summer of 2023. Like McKinley, the 14 year-old soon to be student at Collège Notre-Dame also finds herself on an upward trajectory with the SCC squad.
“Last year, I was tenth, so there was a lot of improvement,” said Chauvin after earning bronze in the U14 Women’s K1 500m race and partnering with Poppy Horn in placing 7th in the K2 500m event. “My technique is much better.”
“My hands are higher and I look like I am more experienced. Last year was my first year racing and I was really nervous. I didn’t care about technique. It was speed, speed, speed; I want to get this over with.”
The counter-productivity of that approach took a little while to sink in – though there was little question that Emma Chauvin was willing to put in the time. “I just have a lot of determination; I want to be good at this,” she said. “I’m not the type of person who will skip a lot of practices.”
Growing up with an affinity to sport – karate, jiu-jitsu, swimming and volleyball, most notably – Chauvin featured the kind of athletic profile that ensured progress in paddling was likely. In the end, however, it’s not even just about physical strength and paddling technique.
“Last year, my boat was a tank,” she said with a smile. “I didn’t use one of the skinny boats because I was still too scared. And skinnier is faster.”
While the regattas this summer have leaned heavily in the direction of the well recognized venue in Welland, Chauvin and the team have also raced in Collingwood, London and Ottawa over the course of the past two years.
“In terms of just getting on the water and racing, I like Welland or London; but if we’re talking about the overall trip experience and doing things with my parents, I really enjoyed Ottawa,” she said.
As for the recent championships, the bronze medal bounty was plentiful for the SCC reps as Evan Volpini (Junior Men’s K1 200m), Abbey Krawczuk (Junior Women’s K1 200m), James Mann / Julien Turpin (Junior Men’s K2 200m) and Abbey Ktawczuk / Danica Jekic (Junior Women’s K2 200m) all placed third in their respective finals.
