The Molokai World Championship surfski and one-man outrigger canoe race was held this past Sunday. It appears there was a bit of an upset with the events usual big names and previous winners not placing, and lots of complaints about the weather conditions. The 37.2 mile race was won for the first time by Tahiti's Lewis Laughlin.Evidently there were beautiful blue sunny skies in Hawaii, and fairly mild ocean conditions. Surf Ski.info reports the conditions as "Blistering hot temperatures, zero cloud-cover, counter-productive side-shore winds and minimal ocean swells setting a torrid stage for the race". They said it was the "most brutal conditions". Previous 11th time winner Oscar Chalupsky said it was "worst conditions ever".
The winner finished in 5hrs, 20min, 6 sec (averaging 7 mph). It was also reported that "many of today's competitors had never paddled continuously for more than five hours, let alone six, seven, or eight."
What's with that? I thought this was a distance paddling race.
And what's with the discrepancies in the winners purse, male $3,000 vs female $750 awarded to the 1st place winners. I'd hoped we'd made more progress getting past that.
5 comments:
Thanks for posting the info- Intersting read!!! Now get out there and paddle!! You got a biggie coming up in 60 + days!!
The division of the purse does seem a triffle barbaric in this day and age. Seems some knuckle-draggers are still living out in Hawaii...
I'll bet the purse split was based on the number of entries in the particular divisions. Probably lots more male soloists so a larger purse.
I'm a female surfski racer so this is going to sound bizarre that I agree with the larger purse for me. But there really aren't many woman racing surfski's or OC1s. It's very male dominated. It's probably 95% male ... or more. So why would they award the one or two women who compete the same amount of money when they really didn't have that much "competition"?
Oops. I meant I agree with the larger purse for MEN ... not ME.
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