The journey to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 starts at Roodeplaat Dam this weekend at the South African Championships. The Friday to Sunday event is a selection event for the SA team for this year’s World Championships in August, and is key to Hamish Lovemore and Esti Olivier and their hopes of paddling at LA28.
There is plenty on the line for other paddlers as well, with the three-day event also being used as the basis for selecting teams for the junior and U23 team to go to their World Championships in Canada in July, and the Olympic Hopes team for their regatta in Slovakia in September.
Olivier, the top women’s sprinter in the country in recent years, is confident and happy with her preparations. “My build-up has been amazing,” said the 33-year-old ranked 73rd in the world. “I’ve had a lot of training with some international paddlers that were based here throughout January, so I’m feeling very strong and comfortable in the boat.
“With the changes of qualifications on the international stage, I’m seeing this weekend as the start of my racing for LA 2028. Paddlers are now going to have to put their best foot forward for two years. There’s no opportunity to waste with any bad races, because for South Africans it’s going to be expensive to do the events we need to do. So if you want to keep those expenses to a minimum you have to make the best out of every event.
“The plan for me is to do the World Cup in Hungary in May and then Brandenburg in Germany a week later. From there I’ll see, maybe do a friendly international event just to test where I’m at in July in Europe and then we’ve got World Champs in August in Poland.”
Olivier will be racing four events over the weekend, the 200m and 500m in a K1 and teaming up with probably her biggest rival in the singles event, Alexa Gooden, in the equivalent K2 races.
With his growing collection of international medals, Lovemore has been the men’s star of SA paddling for the past couple of years and sees the LA Olympics as his major long-term goal. The KZN canoeing coach is doing three events this weekend, the 500m, 1 000m and 5 000m, all in a single, before flying overseas on Saturday night to host a training camp in Spain.
“This is the first stepping stone of the season for me … I’ve got to try and make the SA team otherwise everything else for the rest of the year doesn’t happen,” said the world’s 64th ranked paddler.
“I’ve been training really hard. I’ve been on training camp pretty much since the 4th January – I’ve done three different training camps this year so I’m feeling really prepared. But there are a few young guys that are really fired up. I think the guy to watch this weekend is definitely Uli Hart. We are both from Team Euro Steel so we see each other’s training, but he is in Cape Town we don’t get much time to race against each other. This is going to be our first match-up for the year.”