Blood, sweat and cheers - Paris to welcome kayak cross

LONDON : World champion Joe Clarke knows from experience that blood may be spilled as he goes for gold in the new Olympic discipline of kayak cross at the Paris white water centre in August.

Asked to explain how physical the event can get after a training session at the British team base in Waltham Abbey, Clarke pulls out his phone and plays a video.

It shows him during a practice run in Australia earlier this year taking a blow to the face from the sharp end of another kayak, blood streaming down his wet face.

"It was a big knock, but that's what can happen," Clarke, three-times world champion in kayak cross, previously known as extreme slalom, told Reuters. "I got a boat to the head. They glued it back together and I was out for five days."

Thankfully Clarke has now fully recovered and, after being surprisingly left off the team for the Tokyo Games despite being the reigning Olympic K1 champion, he is energised by the chance to showcase an event he thinks will be compulsive viewing.

"It's the head to head element that gets people on the edge of their seats," Clarke says. "The feedback is instant, first across the line. You see people have a terrible start but go from fourth to first in an instant. Or first to fourth."

Traditional canoe slalom events such as K1 are against the clock, with paddlers negotiating a course of gates in the churning water as quickly as possible without accruing time penalties - a format Clarke admits can be boring.

Kayak cross starts with timed solo runs but then gets really wild. From then on, paddlers go head-to-head in knockout heats involving four boats - launching from a steep ramp, picking their way down the course and even having to perform an Eskimo roll before crossing the line.

It is fast