On 22 of August one of very few freestyle competitions took place in Easter part of Europe. So many events got cancelled and so many plans flipped around that lust and longing for friends, paddling together, challenge and chance to share weekend with other fellow paddlers brought a huge crowd from all around the Europe to a beatiful city of Graz.

Graz has been on freestyle map for years since one of first official World Championships took a place there in 2003 followed by numerous competitions when wave under Radetzky brucke used to work and after the bottom has changed making wave only a memory community came together and managed to transform industrial channel into a training feature creating a world class playspot that this year became highlight for freestyle year.

We had guests from Austria, Netherland, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Czech, Great Britain and Poland creating an amazing atmosphere! Freestyle comp took a place on saturday and was supplied with all amazing local food and drinks through the day while athletes were performing their best to make it into evening finals. After tough battles in K1M Tomasz Czaplicki took gold next to David McClure and Gavin Barker. In Women category Denise Liane Rebnegger with Nuria Fontane i Maso in second and Christina Hochstrasser in 3rd. C1 category belonged to Vilda Klepac while juniors were dominated by Jan Nemec.

One more thing about the Graz – soon thanks to work of community and especially involved Marcel Bloder, they are pushing towards having a city wave that will be shared between surfers and kayakers in the center of Graz!

Here is a quick video from Lucien Schreiber and his perspective on the event!
https://youtu.be/LdFuvH6r4SU