Arévalo, the C4 500 and María Corbera put Spanish canoeing at the top

Spain is on its way to making history on the last day of the Halifax Canoeing World Championship after the 28-year-old Carlos Arévalo from Galicia won his second gold after winning the K1 200m final.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
07 August 2022 Sunday 10:53
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Arévalo, the C4 500 and María Corbera put Spanish canoeing at the top

Spain is on its way to making history on the last day of the Halifax Canoeing World Championship after the 28-year-old Carlos Arévalo from Galicia won his second gold after winning the K1 200m final. This success adds to the gold of the C4 500 of Joan Moreno, Pablo Grana, Manuel Fontán and Adrián Sieiro and the silver of María Corbera in the C1 200, with which Spain already has six medals in the championship, four of them gold.

Arévalo was proclaimed world champion in a great regatta, dominating from the start and beating the pulse of the one who dominated the race in the last competitions, the Hungarian Kolos Csizmadia, who finished third. The canoeist set a time of 36"43, beating the Swede Petter Menning, who came in at 28 hundredths.

The Galician paddler had agreed to the final winning his series but with the third time. However, he starred in an impressive final, first in the entire course that he completed with a time of 36.43, ahead of the Swedish Petter Menning (36.71) and Csizmadia (38.82).

"It was a very hard regatta with a headwind but I felt very good and I'm very happy. The sensations have been very good. Winning gold in K4 and now in K1 is the best. I can't aspire to more", manifested. “It was a very good race, the perfect regatta. The icing on the cake, yesterday is what I was most focused on, today it was difficult for me to enter the competition, but I can't ask for more”, said the Galician.

“I still don't believe it, I'm in a cloud. You have to put your feet on the ground and think of new goals. It is a huge satisfaction after sacrificing so many things. Life takes many turns, from being out of a national team to being a world champion,” she added.

The one from Betanzos adds this new medal to the one obtained on Saturday with the formidable K4 500, which took revenge on Germany, snatching the world crown after having lost at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Together with Saúl Craviotto, Marcus Cooper and Rodrigo Germade , Arévalo has formed a team that was already silver in both the 2019 Szeged World Cup and the Olympic event.

After the three metals of the penultimate day of the Spanish delegation, Spain added the gold of Carlos Arévalo, but also a silver, the one that María Corbera hung in the C1 200. After being fourth in the Race World Cup, María signed a great final in Halifax (Canada), in a test that started well, with the dominance of the Chinese Lin Wenjun, who gave in to the power of the American Nevin Harrison (49.87), champion in 2019, and ended up giving in the fight for silver with María (50.54) for only one hundredth.

The 30-year-old from Madrid, who last year was world champion in C2 200, repeats the silver achieved in the previous world championships in this same event by Antía Jácome.

The C4 500 extended the great moment in the boats of the Spanish team, which stars in a great World Cup final with the conquest of two gold medals and one silver.

In a direct final, without prior classification, Spain took advantage of Germany's absence at the last moment and became world champions with superiority shown by Moreno, Graña, Fontán and Sieiro, who were 49 hundredths ahead of the Poles Aleksander Kitewski, Arsen Sliwinski , Wiktor Glazunow and Norman Zezula, and in 1:10 seconds the Ukrainians Vitaliy Vergeles, Andrii Rybachok, Yurii Vandiuk and Taras Mishchuk.

"We have a great canoeing team in Spain with a very high level, as we are demonstrating in this World Cup, in which we are at the top", Grana highlighted with the satisfaction of the success achieved.