SILVER LINING FOR AUSSIE CANOEISTS AT WORLDS

AUSTRALIA has added to its medal tally at the canoe sprint world championships in Canada, picking up a pair of silver medals as a young crew makes a push for success in Paris.

They may only have been in the boat for six months but the women’s K4 500 crew of Aly Bull, Ella Beere, Alexandra Clarke and Yale Steinpreis claimed second place behind Olympic medallists Poland at Lake Banook in Nova Scotia.

Bull, an Olympic representative at Rio and Tokyo, whose usual partner Alyce Wood missed this year’s championships after recently giving birth to her first child, was the experienced hand alongside Beere, Clarke and Steinpreis.

“It was awesome,” Bull said of the K4 performance.

“We had a cracking start, the boat run in the middle was quite good, then we just hung on for that last 100 or so metres which was really hard, but stoked to come away with the medal.”

Women’s sprint kayak coach Rene Olsen said he was “incredibly proud” of the crew.

“It’s been amazing the trust and commitment that they have had to the team and the high performance program,” Olsen said.

“Hopefully it can be a good start of a new generation for Paddle Australia.”

Olympic K2 champion Jean van der Westhuyzen won silver in the men’s K1 500 behind Czech Republic’s Josef Dostal, snaring the individual medal almost a year to the day after he teamed up with Tom Green in Tokyo to win the K2 title.

In other results, Green narrowly missed the podium in the K1 1000, finishing fourth, while Bull was 0.32sec out of the medals in the K1 500, finishing fifth.

Steinpreis and Beere were fifth in the K2 500, just 0.64 seconds off a medal place.

Kathleen O’Kelly Kennedy was ninth in the KL3 200, while Paralympian Susan Seipel finished fifth overall in the KL2 200. In the men’s K4 500m, the team of Pierre van der Westhuyzen, Fletcher Armstrong, Jackson Collins and Noah Havard finished 12th overall.

The two silvers bring Australia’s medal count to four from the championships, with paracanoe stars Ben Sainsbury and Dylan Littlehales collecting gold and bronze medals earlier in the meet.