Nick’s competition update from the T'Ville Triple Crown
The T’Ville Triple crown is another super cool event along the ‘Fun Tour’. It is the only event that I am aware of that combines Wildwater racing, Slalom racing and Freestyle. It is an overall event so you must compete on all of them and it is your combined result from everything that crowns the winner finally.
The weekend started on Saturday morning, it was a chilly 8 am start with our competitors meeting at the Mill. After the rules were explained and a couple cups of coffee from our friends at Adventurous Joe’s Coffee we were ready to start.
First off was the five minute sprint for the Wildwater race. Now five minutes don’t seem like a lot of time, though trust me, it doesn’t take long for your shoulders to start burning and your forearms to cramp up. Paddling across the finish line feels like such a relief, you can take a much needed deep breath and try and regain your strength.
Immediately following the Wildwater is the Slalom race. It is a great course with a couple of challenging moves and exhausting river wide ferries. After your two runs in Slalom, if you weren’t tired enough, you get to finish the day off with a Freestyle competition. Obviously for me the freestyle was my string point of the three events.
The first day is the prelims for all three events, with only the top 10 making it on to Sunday. After the first day I had a 3rd in Wildwater, 3rd in Slalom and 1st in Freestyle, placing me in a tied 1st with EJ for the combined points.
Sunday we started over with the score sheets being erased and everyone at zero points. My Wildwater run was even better, six seconds faster with an 4:06 finish. Though it wasn’t enough with EJ also being five seconds faster and Danny Stock topping his previous time by 17 seconds. So I started off Sunday with a 3rd place finish in Wildwater again.
Next was Slalom. EJ and Danny battled it out and ended up with a tie down to the hundreds of a second both with 98.67 seconds. With another 3rd in Slalom it was going to be hard to win the overall unless both EJ and Danny didn’t perform in Freestyle. It came down to the final rides in Freestyle, with myself in 1st and EJ in 4th and Danny in 5th it came down to EJ’s last ride. If he beated me, he would win, if he placed better than 2nd or 3rd Danny would win, and if he stayed 4th I would win the overall.
The excitement was in the air and anything was possible. EJ dropped in and had a great ride, just barely beating my 960 ride with his 965 point ride. It came down to a five point shuvit for the win, the lowest scoring trick on the list.
It was obviously a tight competition for the final results to come down to the very last ride. In the end EJ won the over all, Danny placed 2nd and I placed 3rd.
We are now off to West Virginia to try and get the tail end of some high water before I start my grueling four day drive to California.
Nick Troutman