CANOE BELIEVE IT
Eilidh feared her dreams had been sunk but Tokyo 2020 is now totally within her reach
Eilidh Gibson admits Tokyo 2020 will finally float her boat — after years of having to endure that sinking feeling while watching the Olympics.
Scots slalom canoe prospect Gibson watched the Rio Olympics feeling nothing but frustration.
While top male canoeists were competing for medals aplenty their female counterparts had just four events to aim at.
Now that has all changed with some male events being ditched to ensure there are equal opportunities for both sexes.
Kinross ace Gibson, 22, said: “It’s massively exciting and I’m a big advocate for women’s sport and for it to become kind of gender equal.
“Racing against some of the girls who have really pioneered our class is quite a privilege. So to be that first person ever who gets to go, it would be absolutely incredible.”
Whi le Gibson faces tough competition to earn an Olympic place she can already boast a World Championship win with the British team in France last year and two European titles of her own.
Battling the odds is nothing new for Gibson.
Growing up in Kinross meant the chances to hone her canoe skills were limited.
Building up her power on canals was one solution while Glasgow’s artif icial course at Pinkston provided more of a challenge and saw her travel hundreds of miles back and forth by bus after being spotted by the sport’s talent scouts.
The journeys got even longer once she started her biomedical science degree at Edinburgh University and had to make the 1000-mile round trip to London every single weekend for specialist work.
Now that she has graduated she is based near British Canoeing’s Lee Valley HQ.
Gibson said: “Training in Scotland is pretty brutal.
“There’s not really any kind of sugarcoating it.
“I’ve been based in Edinburgh, and we went to the canal, which is obviously a flat-water canal.
“Or you drive for an hour, minimum, to go to any wild water, which is pretty much incomparable to the London course, and I didn’t even have a coach.
“You basically just spend your whole time driving across Scotland.
“Now the training facility at Lee Valley is just world-class.
“I live 10 minutes away and every morning, you go in, you do your warm-up in the gym then you go out on to the water and you’ve got a coach and video.
“You come in and you do your video analysis.
“Then your physio’s there, your gym coach is there, psychology is there. That’s one of the things I’ve really capital ised on, having everyone in and everything I need in the same place.”
Overseeing the bui ld- up of Gibson – and Scots triple-Olympic medallist David Florence – is a familiar face with a new role.
Richard Hounslow was the partner-in-crime of Florence in Rio and at London 2012 when they landed C2 silver.
Now retired, he has been handed the task of keeping his old chum on course for a fourth Games while also coaching Gibson towards her debut.
Gibson said: “He kind of brings just an unwavering belief in me and, believe me, my belief wavers.
“Obviously, he’s been on the international circuit for years and years, and has gone to the Olympics. He just knows exactly what it’s
like to be at those places, and places I ’ ve not been yet. “Also, he didn’t do it himself very long ago. “I mean, he only retired two years ago so it really is fresh in his mind. “I think because he’s kind of newly into coaching, he’s just so motivated for it. “But David gives me a lot of help too. “We end up chatting a lot of the time about courses, preparation and everything. “Just being around someone of that kind of calibre means you’re just constantly learning, even when he’s just chatting. “I really, really enjoy being part of my group.” An injury means Gibson will skip this week’s European Under-23 Championships in the hope of targeting the World Cup campaign at the end of the season. Then the race to Tokyo begins properly next spring – with all the Brits ready to fight to the last to be history makers when the girls get in on the act. Gibson knows it will be a fight to the finish but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
She said: “I would actually much prefer that than to be in the kind of in a country where I was the only one and I’d go kind of by default.”
Yet for all she’s ready to take the plunge in earnest now, Gibson revealed she could have been making a quite different splash at one time.
Her first Olympic memories as a kid were not of canoeing but of swimming.
She said:“I actually quite clearly remember it because I used to be a swimmer.
“So I was eight and I was watching the Athens Olympics and I was watching the swimming.
“For two weeks, I literally did not do anything else.
“I didn’t really watch that much TV when I was young, but I literally did not turn off the TV during the Athens Olympics.
“I think I watched something every day and that was it.
“I just have always wanted to go to the Olympics.
“Back then my only focus was for swimming and then when I kind of swapped sports and did canoeing, it has always been canoeing since then.”