10/03/00
A Plunge Into Water Sport
Summary:
Next month, Hobart is hosting the World Underwater Hockey Championships. National underwater hockey player and referee GRAHAM HENDERSON explains the finer points of this port. He says that from above the pool it looks like water ballet, but from inside the pool it feels like gridiron!
And Australia is ranked world number one in the sport of canoe polo, another pool sport. Players BRUCE TONKIN and JENNY HOURIGAN describe the sport that looks and feels like jousting on water.
Water skiiers around the globe are on tenterhooks. The International OIympic Committee's April meeting will decide if water skiing gets on the Olympic program for the 2004 Games in Athens. MAX KIRWAN, a pioneer of water skiing in Australia, profiles the past, present and future of this sport. Plus, as the Moomba Masters Water Skiing Championship gets underway in Melbourne, past and present competitors give us the lowdown on the event once dubbed the "Wimbledon of water skiing".
Details or Transcript:
THEME
Amanda Smith: The Sports Factor this morning gets wet with a range of water sports, from water skiing, to underwater hockey, to canoe polo.
Now the Moomba Masters Water Skiing Championship is currently under way on the Yarra River in Melbourne. This is the 40th year of the competition, which attracts the best tournament skiiers in the world.
ATMOS - WATER SKIER HITTING A JUMP
Commentator: …That’s a great jump there from Kelly Bowen straight out of the hat there, that’s a huge jump…
Amanda Smith: The Moomba Masters Water Skiing almost didn’t happen this year, because of changes to the nature and funding of events that have traditionally made up the Moomba Festival. Max Kirwan has been the Co-ordinator of the Moomba Masters since it began in 1961. Max is something of a pioneer of competitive water skiing in Australia: he first skiied back in 1945 when people were amazed that such a thing could be done, and went on to hold the Austral-Asian Speed Skiing Title. In the past, the Moomba Masters Championship has attracted the highest number of spectators to a water ski event anywhere in the world. But is this still the case? Max Kirwan:
Max Kirwan: It is still the case. Yes Amanda, and one of the things associated with that is that we have in Melbourne a very unique waterway; it’s right in the heart of our capital city, it’s good clean water these days. It had an earlier history of not being so clean, but right now you can fish where we water-ski and get a good catch of fish too, I might add. But getting back to the uniqueness of this, it is an amphitheatre, as such, the Yarra River, it’s ideally suited for the sport which we are involved in. And as such, it draws mammoth crowds.
Amanda Smith: How did the event come about in the first place?
Max Kirwan: OK. Well like everything else, water-skiing is a new sport of course, we know that. It’s new because it’s not 100 years of age like lots of sports are. But it revolved around getting fun things together for people that had boats capable of pulling people behind boats, and it developed from a rather elite sport, into a family sport and now it’s quite inexpensive to be part of water skiing operations. Generally you’ll find if you get three or four people together they put in to buy a boat and then all their families go out and enjoy it. That’s the way it sort of started off many, many years ago, and developed into a competitive field which was actually copied from the Americans at Cypress Gardens, and we then took up that style of the sport, which was slalom, jump and trick skiing. And so water skiing was developed here in Australia.
Amanda Smith: Well let’s talk a bit more about the early days of water skiing in Australia. I believe that the very first Australian to ski on water was Ted Parker, and that was on Sydney Harbour in 1934. Now I suppose that the sport of water skiing couldn’t have been invented much before then because boats wouldn’t have been able to travel fast enough to tow a skiier, is that right?
Max Kirwan: Well there’s a lot on what you say, Amanda, although the sport was originally started in America back in 1927 by a person who had a fairly powerful boat, and he was the originator of putting planks on the water. Before that, in the early days, they were being towed on a board, not with two separate skis. They cut the board in half and put some shoes on them and laced their feet into the shoes and so water skiing was born. Ralph Samuelson was his name and he came from Florida, and he was the father of water skiing in effect.
Amanda Smith: Do you remember the very first time you tried to get up on skis?
Max Kirwan: I remember it well. It was on Albert Park Lake and the fellow that was towing me, he got me up first time that I tried on two skis, and went straight up Albert Park Lake and then turned sharply left. And because I didn’t know what to do, I just went straight on, until he got to the end of the rope and I was hanging on for dear life, and the boat was going the opposite direction to me at this stage, and I just was thrown through the air at a great rate of knots and landed in a pile of confusion, amongst other things! And that was my first learning curve as to how you had to press on one foot or the other, to make the skiier go to left or to right. But I didn’t know it at that stage, I was just so taken up with getting up on the skis and travelling at about 30 miles an hour across the water.
Amanda Smith: How much has tournament water skiing, competitive water skiing changed since those early days of your involvement?
Max Kirwan: Well the changes are quite dramatic. For instance, to jump (we’ll put it into feet if you don’t mind) to jump about 30 feet through the air was considered to be something in the early days, and it went on from there to 50 and 60 and so on, until finally we decided we had to get to 100 here in Australia, and I was not one of those. The sport had left me behind at that stage. But we introduced into Australia two American skiiers, Jim Jackson, notably called, and still is, ‘Flea’ Jackson; and a fellow called Chuck Stearns. Typical American names. And they really took us ahead. And Moomba was the reason that water skiing advanced so quickly in Australia, because we were able to afford through Moomba, the costs of bringing them out here, and this actually lifted us into a new realm of water skiing. They were jumping 120 feet and 125 feet in those days when they came here, and we had not hit the ton at that stage. And so the two American boys really showed us how to do it, and we learnt dramatically from those lessons. We also had two early skiiers in Betty Leighton and John Kumm who were also very early pioneers of water skiing, and they went off to America to represent us at the World Championships in Florida, and they also brought back these techniques that we were able to pick up on and lift our skiiers to the level that they are today, which is the best in the world.
ATMOS - BOAT GOES BY
Commentator: …32.7 for Kelly. That’s an excellent jump from Kelly Bowen…
Amanda Smith: One of the Australian competitors in the jump event at this weekend’s Moomba Masters is David Cortous. Tournament skiiers like David have long exceeded the 100-feet mark for the jump. These days, it’s 200-plus feet that they jump. Although he’s still only in his 20s, David Cortous has a long history in his sport, having first got up on a pair of skis at a pretty young age.
David Cortous: Six years old I was when I started skiing, actually started jumping when I was seven, so I’ve been doing it for quite a long time now.
Amanda Smith: And why did you choose to specialise in the jump event?
David Cortous: I don’t know, maybe a lack of brains! I was involved in all three disciplines and my jumping was the strongest event, and I could compete at international level in jump, whereas the other two events I was more just at a national level. So I decided to drop out of the other two events and really concentrate hard on the jump event.
Amanda Smith: And the jump event is the dangerous one of the three, yes?
David Cortous: Yes. There’s always the element of danger when you go out there; we jump long distances, over 200-feet, or between 60 metres and 70 metres, so it’s a long way. Obviously going that far something does happen, it can be very dangerous.
Amanda Smith: How important is the driver of the boat in tournament water skiing?
David Cortous: Obviously the driver’s an important aspect of it, but the boats now that we are using are a fully-imported American boat; they’re worth between $50,000 and $60,000 and they’re run by computer, like a cruise control in a car, just a lot more advanced. All the boat is doing is enabling us to do what we do, I guess like a basketballer has a basketball court, we have a boat. Now it’s the same boat for every single skiier, and it’s run exactly the same way, so you punch into the computer the skiier’s weight and a few other bits and pieces, and once that’s all dialled in before you leave the dock, the boat’s just like a mechanism, it just goes. It’s not like a speed skiing event where driver’s working with skiier; what we do is totally up to the individual skiier at the back.
Amanda Smith: So for the jump event, your event, what speed is the boat travelling at?
David Cortous: The boat does 35 miles an hour, which is roughly 60 kilometres an hour. Now when we cut to the ramp, obviously we’re putting a lot of strain, backpull, on the boat. That’s where the cruise control kicks in and that’s where that works. As we pull the boat back it will accelerate to hold the 35 miles an hour speed.
Amanda Smith: Do you use different types of skis for different events? And are we talking about one ski or two skis here?
David Cortous: Yes, we certainly do. For the slalom event it’s a single ski, very highly tuned; a trick ski is a lot shorter, fatter, it’s kind of like a board I guess, there’s no fins on it, it’s very slippery; and then your jump skis, you jump on two skis, they’re very long, they’re all aerodynamic, they’ve got a very small fin on them so yes, that’s the difference in the skis.
Amanda Smith: Now I imagine that across the three disciplines of tournament skiing that you need things like strength and co-ordination and balance, but presumably, particularly in the jumps that you do, you also need to develop an ability to recover from heavy falls.
David Cortous: Yes well obviously the falls can take their toll, so you just try to eliminate them and keep them very, very minimal.
Amanda Smith: Do you fall often, and what sort of injuries have you copped?
David Cortous: With jumping yes, if you’re crash jumping it can be fairly severe. I’ve been carted off in an ambulance many times, but fingers crossed, that won’t happen again.
Amanda Smith: David Cortous, who’s competing this weekend in the jump section of the Moomba Masters Water Ski Championship.
Jodie Skipper is another competitor. She’s a past Australian and Moomba Masters Champion. Jodie competes in the jump, slalom and trick events.
Jodie Skipper: Tricking I think’s the most difficult event. I do all three events, which is slalom, trick and jump, and I’m actually competing in the overall events as well. But tricks is the most difficult, and we find that people tend to not persevere with this event because it is so time-consuming, and it takes many hours, you know, more in the water than on the water, because the tricks are so difficult these days, that people continually fall and fall, and have many injuries from learning these tricks. But basically you get two 20-second passes in which to complete as many tricks as you possibly can without repeating the trick. And if you manage to stay on top of the water at the end of that two 20-second passes, you’ll have a total of points.
Now the trick is, to stay on top of the water. Many people fall due to difficulty of tricks. However if you don’t have the difficulty of tricks, even if you do stand up, you might not have enough points to win.
Amanda Smith: So you’ve mentioned the passes in which you’ve got to do as many tricks as possible. How many are you actually usually completing in the time?
Jodie Skipper: Well I do 12 tricks on one pass and 13 tricks on the other. But somebody else might have only 10 tricks and 10 tricks, but the points though you might be higher, but also so is the difficulty. So as the difficulty increases, you have to be aware that possibly you might fall earlier.
Amanda Smith: Are skiiers always trying to come up with new tricks to impress the judges?
Jodie Skipper: Oh yes. They certainly are. The guys that are at the top are always coming up with new tricks, and I’d have to say I’m not 100% sure, but I’m sure there’s tricks that they do that aren’t listed on the world rankings trick list, but they have to go through a process of international committee members to have those tricks on the list. And there has to be a safety issue involved, and there has to be a few people from different regions in the world to give the thumbs-up to these new tricks. But I daresay that they’re always coming up with new stuff, yes.
Amanda Smith: Do you do any sort of cross-training for trick skiing? Do you do any snow skiing or gymnastics maybe?
Jodie Skipper: I don’t specifically set out to do anything like that. However I do try to keep my weight down, not that I’m excessively thin or anything, but I find that my points per second, say 20-seconds when I’ve got my 13 tricks or my 12 tricks, I find that I move a lot quicker on the water when I’m a little bit leaner.
Amanda Smith: Now aside from the two individual events you’re competing in here at the Moomba Masters, you mentioned you’re also doing the overall event. So what does that mean and what does that involve?
Jodie Skipper: That’s a compilation of the slalom, trick and jump event. They take the best score from each event and work out an average, and some people might say that if you win that event you’re the best average skiier in the world, but it’s quite an amazing achievement to keep three events strong, and the training time is what really gets you because you pretty much have to train three times more than a person that’s only doing one event.
ATMOS - WATER SKIER HITTING A JUMP
Commentator: …Let’s see if she can. That’s a nice little jump. Maybe just a little shy, but still she’s put in the effort….
Amanda Smith: Now as I mentioned earlier, it’s been a bumpy ride for the Moomba Masters organisers this year. After a 40-year association, the Water Ski Championship is no longer an official part of the Moomba Festival. Is this because water skiing is no longer considered a culturally interesting event? Co-ordinator, Max Kirwan.
Max Kirwan: The City of Melbourne decided that they would call for tenders to try and change Moomba. They got an Adelaide-based company, APA, to come over and do it for them, and they agreed to their terms, which were that they would take Moomba away from its site it had been on for 40 years, which was the Alexandra Gardens and the River, and they would concentrate their efforts in the CBD in more or less a cultural sense, not a sporting sense. Now we were of course encouraged to go on under our own steam, so out of all that, we had a position where we had to try and generate the necessary funds with no help at all from Melbourne City Council in terms of funding, and to do it all we had to take up the challenge, find the money to get it to happen, and we’ve done that, with a great deal of problems, but we managed to do it under our own auspices, as I said. And all of us working together as a team were determined that the Moomba Masters would continue, and it has.
Amanda Smith: Well Max, on the world water skiing front, I expect you’re all on tenterhooks, waiting for the International Olympic Committee’s meeting next month, which will decide whether water skiing gets to be an event at the 2004 Summer Games in Athens. What will swing the IOC’s decision on that one way or other?
Max Kirwan: A little bit of background, and it’s this, that in order to gain access to the Olympics, we are one of 27 sports, all trying to gain admission to the Olympics. To do so you need a recommendation to the Olympic Committee by the host city. And in this instance we thought we had that in Sydney, but unfortunately triathalon and taekwondo beat us out of that and gained access. What we have at the moment is the Athens Olympic Committee have recommended water skiing as the only sport that they want to recommend, and this we believe will be accepted by the IOC for the Athens 2004, principally because we’ve covered every possible avenue of the requirements, but I wake up screaming of a night thinking the worst of things, and crossing my fingers, waiting for the decision, as does every water skiier throughout the world. And we are hanging on like heck, and hoping like heck that the decision will be coming up and it will be favourable.
Amanda Smith: Max Kirwan, Co-ordinator of the Moomba Masters Water Ski Championship for the past 40 years, and still going strong. And Max is also the President of the Asia-Australia region of the International Water Ski Federation.
And now, plunging deeper into the world of water sports, to underwater hockey, or ‘Octopush’, as it’s also sometimes called. This is a sort of variant of ice hockey, except that instead of playing on the surface of frozen water, it’s played in a swimming pool, under the water, with a puck on the bottom of the pool. It’s kind of a weird idea, but those who play underwater hockey are deeply enthusiastic about it.
One of the legends of the game is Graham Henderson. He’s the President of the Australian Underwater Federation, the chief referee for underwater hockey in Australia; and he’ll be playing with the National Men’s Masters Team at the World Underwater Hockey Championships, which are being held next month in Hobart.
POOLSIDE ATMOS
Graham Henderson: Look, we’re doing it again. Matt passed to you before, and facing me you just flicked off backwards, Matt, up the pool, straight to them. Guys, you’re just not looking where you’re passing. Harry, you’re getting bottled up something shocking by two of them over there, all the time. Break free! Let’s swim diagonally across the pool. I mean winning’s OK, but let’s win with a smile.
ATMOS - UNDERWATER HOCKEY GAME IN PROGRESS
Graham Henderson: Well in short, it’s a game you play with ten people, but only six can play in the water at any one time, so you have four interchange players. You use a mask, snorkel and fins, a small hockey stick, a 1.3-kilo lead puck on the bottom of the pool, and a protective cap and glove.
Amanda Smith: Well is it most closely related to ice hockey or field hockey, or what?
Graham Henderson: Some of the position plays and things is probably related to field hockey to some degree. Some people say there’s things a lot like soccer, but there’s no offside rule in underwater hockey. So no, I think it’s pretty unique; it’s more a sport of its own.
Amanda Smith: Is it a game of strength and aggro, or is it a game of skill?
Graham Henderson: I suppose at the top level it’s a combination of both, like most sports, but at the lower level, no, it’s definitely more a game of skill and a game where you have to do a lot of thinking because you’re doing it all alone, in an environment where nobody can year you.
Amanda Smith: Yes. Well tell me about the difference in how underwater hockey looks from above the water, to how it looks from below the water?
Graham Henderson: Well I think I could best sum it up by saying on the surface it probably looks like water ballet, and from underneath it certainly looks like gridiron!
Amanda Smith: Do the underwater conditions in some way level out physical differences between players?
Graham Henderson: Oh most certainly. I mean I suppose strength in any sport can be a factor at the top level, but it’s not probably as important in underwater hockey, because you’re in a weightless environment anyway, so therefore weight doesn’t really matter much.
Amanda Smith: Do you have to be a good swimmer to be good at underwater hockey?
Graham Henderson: No, not at all actually. We get a lot of people who really can’t swim very much at all. But of course with fins on, that helps them along and they learn to swim actually from playing underwater hockey.
Amanda Smith: Now everyone, Graham, thinks their own sport is special, but what’s unique about underwater hockey?
Graham Henderson: Well that’s easy to sum up actually. I suppose we can think of underwater hockey as the only sport in the world you play while you’re not breathing! It would be like running from the half-back flank on a football field all the way to the goal, and kicking a goal while you’re holding your breath.
Amanda Smith: I suppose another thing that struck me while I was watching you, is that this is a sport that’s played in three dimensions. Whereas in most team sports you’ve got a playing field that has width and length, in underwater hockey you’ve also got depth. So what does this 3-D aspect of underwater hockey mean as a player?
Graham Henderson: Well I suppose if you liken it to a field sport, the thing you can do in underwater hockey is I can just swim clean over somebody, I don’t have to jump at them, I just swim up and over them. So you’re right, it is three dimensional, and that makes for a lot of different situations because you’re in a weightless environment and you can move in absolutely any direction, and there’s no other sport you can do that in.
Amanda Smith: Well how did you get involved in underwater hockey?
Graham Henderson: I’m an avid scuba diver, and basically when I was doing a dive course many, many years ago, I saw a little notice that said anybody who would like to come and play underwater hockey, have a go. And I thought, ‘Well you must be kidding, so I’d better go and have a look at this’, and I did.
Amanda Smith: Well underwater hockey, you’d have to say, (I know you’re deeply involved in it) but from the outside, it’s kind of a wacky idea. When and where and why was underwater hockey developed as a sport?
Graham Henderson: Right, well underwater hockey started in 1952 in England, and it was a sport developed for the Navy divers, who of course in the middle of winter in Europe, nobody goes diving in the North Sea, so they needed something to keep them fit during winter. And the game initially started with a shortened version of a field hockey stick, and a round weighted ball on the bottom. But the equipment of course has evolved to what we’ve got today.
Amanda Smith: Well Graham, you’re not only a player and also a former national team coach, you’re also the head referee for underwater hockey in Australia. How do you referee a game? Are you also underwater in the pool?
Graham Henderson: In any game we have three referees: we have two in-water referees that actually swim around watching the game, and we have one out-of-water referee looking for surface infringements and interchange fouls and things like that.
Amanda Smith: So how do you signal a foul? Because you can’t really blow a whistle underwater, can you?
Graham Henderson: No, that’s true, nobody can year you scream. What they do, the referee just simply sees a foul, places his hand up out of the water, and the out-of-water referee just hits the electronic buzzer and the game comes to a stop.
Amanda Smith: Well Graham, underwater hockey isn’t exactly a well-known sport in the wider community; you must get some quizzical comments from people when they find out that this is what you’re into.
Graham Henderson: Oh most certainly. I mean it’s a standard reaction, a person has a little bit of a giggle or a snicker when you say you play underwater hockey, it’s always, ‘Underwater what?’ and they don’t believe you. But I relate it to a lot of other sports; some people might think it’s strange to walk around a paddock with a little stick and hitting a white dimpled ball into a hole in the ground, to some people that may seem obscure, so you know, there’s hope for underwater hockey.
Amanda Smith: Graham Henderson, and underwater hockey, which must be one of the very few sports where you can’t get done for verbal abuse during play!
Now another somewhat unusual pool sport is one called Canoe Polo. On certain nights at swimming pools around Australia, the lap swimmers give way to men and women who are ferociously paddling their canoes around the pool.
ATMOS - CANOE POLO GAME IN PROGRESS
Amanda Smith: Two of the Canoe Polo players out there on the pool are Bruce Tonkin and Jenny Hourigan. So what’s this particular watery sport all about? Bruce Tonkin:
Bruce Tonkin: The basic idea is that you have five players on each side, playing on a 50-metre Olympic pool, and you’re shooting a water polo ball into a goal suspended two metres above the water surface.
Amanda Smith: Where did it come from?
Bruce Tonkin: It started off in the Northern Hemisphere, in England, where people that were white water paddlers, paddling rivers and rapids, wanted something to keep fit during the winter months, and so they began to play it on rivers and lakes, and indoor swimming pools.
Amanda Smith: So now Bruce, across the myriad sports you could have chosen to play, why did you choose Canoe Polo?
Bruce Tonkin: I chose Canoe Polo because it’s exciting and it’s a fairly aggressive game. So it’s a good chance to get rid of all your aggressions from the week.
Amanda Smith: Yes, well how heated or aggressive does it get out there on the pool?
Bruce Tonkin: Well most people are pretty heavily padded; we wear helmets with faceguards, and we wear life jackets for padding, and each of the boats have got thick foam around the end. So it’s pretty much you can paddle into people as hard as you like. The main thing you’re not allowed to do is hit people with your paddle.
Amanda Smith: But I did notice a bit of paddle-to-paddle contact; it almost looked like jousting at times.
Bruce Tonkin: Yes, that’s right. Often you’re competing for space, and part of that is you use the paddle to try to get yourself as much space as you can so that you can get to the ball or get a shot towards goal.
Amanda Smith: People were also tipping over in their canoes a bit. What happens if you really tip all the way over, if you tip 180-degrees? How easy is it to get back up?
Bruce Tonkin: For a beginner, it’s difficult, but part of the game of Canoe Polo is to be able to roll up, and so part of the rules are you can paddle your boat into another boat and tip them over, and you’re also allowed to push people over with one hand. So an integral part of the tame is tipping over and rolling back up.
Amanda Smith: And what you’re also doing is manoeuvring the ball with your paddle as well as with your hand, yes?
Bruce Tonkin: Yes, the paddle is allowed to block the ball and you can bump the ball forward to the direction you wish to travel, but you’re not allowed to take a swing at it, you’re not allowed to treat it like a cricket bat.
Amanda Smith: But you are allowed to ram into each other?
Bruce Tonkin: Certainly, that’s the best part of the game.
ATMOS - GAME IN PROGRESS
Amanda Smith: Now Jenny, how is it playing mixed teams? Once you’re in a canoe on the water, is there much difference in the way men and women play?
Jenny Hourigan: There is actually. I find it (because I’m only 5’2", pretty small) when I play against big guys, I feel like a cork sometimes. They can just push me around, do whatever, and that’s a problem because it’s just a momentum thing. So that gets frustrating from my point of view. But you find that girls tend to compensate and play a more tactical game I think.
ATMOS - GAME IN PROGRESS
Amanda Smith: Are most Canoe Polo players also canoeists?
Bruce Tonkin: Well a Canoe Polo player is by definition a canoeist. Most Canoe Polo players paddle on rivers, white-water paddling.
Amanda Smith: So what are the similarities or differences there? Or how does being a white-water canoeist help being a Canoe Polo player?
Bruce Tonkin: With white-water, a lot of the time you’re being buffeted by very turbulent water, and it knocks you from side to side. And you need to be able to react to that but still get the boat steering in the direction you wish to travel. And as the rapids get bigger, the probability of tipping over becomes high. So if you can paddle big rapids, then the same skills follow to Canoe Polo, where you can be knocked from side to side by other players, you can be pushed from side to side, you can get knocked over, and you have to be able to react to that.
Amanda Smith: Is Canoe Polo contested internationally?
Bruce Tonkin: Yes it is. The main States in Australia are South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria, but it’s also played in the other States. And international tournaments are played mostly against European countries, like Germany, Italy and Great Britain. But it’s also played against some of the countries in the Pacific region, like Japan, Tonga, New Zealand.
Amanda Smith: And what’s the peak Canoe Polo competition?
Bruce Tonkin: Well the Australians are generally recognised as the best in the world at the game, and so I guess the peak competition is the Australian national championships, generally rotated between Melbourne and Sydney most often.
Amanda Smith: Bruce, this is a pretty unusual team sport. Some would say it’s a bit bizarre, when you look at it first off. Do you think it’s a sign of the times that more people seem to be choosing different sports from the traditional football, or netball, or tennis and so on, than they might have learnt as a child?
Bruce Tonkin: Yes, I think people like to try something different at different stages of their life. Most people pick up Canoe Polo when they’re in, I guess, their early 20s. People who end up in Canoe Polo are generally outdoor enthusiasts. They’re often skiiers, and mountain climbers, and white-water paddlers. So they’re all generally outdoor enthusiasts, and like something with a bit of a challenge.
Amanda Smith: And presumably Canoe Polo is something that you outdoor enthusiasts can do when you’re trapped in town, or when the weather’s not so good?
Bruce Tonkin: Yes, that’s right. In fact, it’s always been very hard to run a competition on weekends, because nobody’s in town. Most people use Canoe Polo as a bit of a cross-training exercise. It keeps you fit during the week, and particularly during the winter, when outside, going for a run in the rain’s not so good. But when the weekend comes, it’s off to the ski slopes, or off to the rivers to paddle, or off to the mountains to climb.
ATMOS - GAME IN PROGRESS
Amanda Smith: And we heard there from Canoe Polo players Bruce Tonkin and Jenny Hourigan. And the World Canoe Polo Championships are being held this year in Brazil. And as Bruce Tonkin said, Australia is ranked Number One in the world in this sport, both for men and for women. So our national teams are keen to uphold their titles in Brazil in July this year.
And that’s The Sports Factor for now. Thanks for your company. Michael Shirrefs produces the program; and I’m Amanda Smith.
THEME
Guests on this program:
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Max Kirwan President of the Asia-Australia Region of the International Water Ski Federation and Co-ordinator of the Moomba Masters Water Ski Tournament in Melbourne |
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David Cortous Australian water skier |
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Jodie Skipper Australian water skier |
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Graham Henderson President of the Australian Underwater Federation, Chief Referee for underwater hockey in Australian and a player with the National Men's Masters Team |
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Bruce Tonkin Canoe polo player |
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Jenny Hourigan Canoe polo player |
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Michael Shirrefs
©1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation