“When you go from Western Canada to go race at Nationals for the first time, that same feeling of ‘oh man I have no idea how fast everyone’s going to be, I am going to get dropped’ but you just try not to think about it and line up. At Worlds it feels like the same thing but you look at the guy next to you and think ‘that guy is definitely a U23’ but then he’s a Junior. The biggest thing when we went there, lining up on the start line I didn’t quite know what to think, we made it through the heats but it wasn’t really a great race. Then we lined up for the semis like ‘this was it, we had to go’ and you feel intimidated because you have no idea how fast everyone else was going to be, you can’t just blast off the line and try to hang in there because you don’t know if the other guys are going to be pacing out the same as you but you also can’t go slow, the big thing at International competitions that doesn’t happen much at Canadian competitions is that crews like Hungary, Slovakia, there’s a lot of countries where teams will just blast off the line and wash out half the crews. If you aren’t off the line fast, you’re going to have to deal with wash and if you get to that point you wont be making it into the finals. Honestly when you’re at Worlds, all we had left to race for was trying to race for the best 1000m we could, since I wasn’t racing any singles it’s like I was racing for the person in this boat with me. Yeah it’s awesome.” – Gavin Jaeger-Freeborn, Canadian Canoer. (3/4)
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