Last night saw Alex McIntyre gained his first international podium of his career with a 3rd place in the ICF ranking sprint race at Augsburg Germany amongst a solid field of 38 starters from many of the powerhouse Nations in the sport including Slovenia, Germany and France.
Alex who has been living, working and training in Rosenheim Germany for the last 18 months was joined by his brother Robert last weekend as they prepare for this year’s World Championship and World Cup tour which commences in 2 weeks time and this was their first big hit out in a major race of the season.
The heats saw Alex get off to a shaky start on the quite difficult course with a few errors that saw him placed 25th. Brother Robert had a good clean start and finished 4th fastest to qualify automatically to the final. In the second run Alex had a much improved time to finish 5th fastest to move to the final in 10th qualifying position.
In the final Alex was one of the few paddlers that actually improved his heat run time and took the lead after his run with a time of 52.69 seconds and sat back and watched as many of the more favoured seeds fell short of their heat times. Ultimately he was relegated back to 3rd position with Nejc Znidarcic from Slovenia taking the Win in a time of 50.81 and Bjoern Beerschwenger from Germany finishing second in a time of 52.06.
Robert McIntyre finished in tenth position in a time of 54.08.
After the event Alex said he was stoked with his performance amongst this quality field and said that he felt his finals run was controlled. He said it is the sort of course that if you push the limits too hard it is very easy to come up short with a costly error. He also made the top 24 qualifiers in the boater cross event with the finals to be run tomorrow after the Euro Cup Sprint race which will see both he and Robert line up again.
