New Zealand canoe racer Aimee Fisher has won the K1 500 final at the second Canoe Sprint World Cup regatta of the season, holding off a wall of partisan German support on Pauline Jagsch’s home water at Brandenburg.
Fisher crossed the line in one minute 54.45 seconds, just 0.4 of a second clear of Jagsch, with Anna Pulawska of Poland taking bronze. The pair were locked stride for stride through the back half of the race as the crowd roared the German on, but the Rotorua paddler found enough in the last 50 metres to keep her nose in front.
The conditions were anything but flat. A side wind picked up as the field arrived on the start line, leaving every paddler battling to keep their boat on a clean line through the 500 metres.
“It was an epic contest in such difficult conditions,” Fisher told RNZ Sport after the race.
“That side wind really picked up just as we were coming into the start line. I don’t think I’ve ever raced with a perpendicular side wind so it needed a lot of skill and heart out there.”
The gold goes one better than her result at the opening World Cup leg in Szeged a week earlier, where she finished second in the same event. Two regattas, a silver and a gold, and a clear signal that the 30 year old is in form heading into the back half of the northern season.
It has not been a quiet start to the cycle for Fisher. With the rebuilt K4 line up named for Szeged, she was originally pencilled in for the single and double only. That changed when Dame Lisa Carrington withdrew on medical advice, and Fisher was asked to step into the four boat alongside Olivia Brett, Greer Morley and Lucy Matehaere.
Carrington, the most decorated New Zealand Olympian of all time and recently announced as expecting her first child, has not retired and still intends to be on the start line in Los Angeles in 2028. The Brandenburg regatta was simply not the right race for her right now.
That decision has thrown Fisher straight back into the multi crew environment she largely stepped away from after the Tokyo Olympic cycle, when she chose to focus on the K1. The K4 quartet have had only a few weeks together as a unit and finished ninth in their Brandenburg final, an honest result against crews that have been training in their current line ups for far longer.
For Fisher personally, the gold is the headline. Her K1 500 medal in Brandenburg is her first individual World Cup gold of the new Olympic cycle and lands at a venue that has rarely been kind to visiting paddlers. Brandenburg sits in the heartland of German flatwater sprinting and the home crowd was loud enough through the final 200 metres to be heard clearly on the broadcast.
It is also a strong marker against the field. Jagsch is one of Germany’s leading single boat paddlers and Pulawska has been on the world championship podium in recent years, so beating both on a windy day suggests the work Fisher has done in Cambridge under Gordon Walker’s broader programme is converting cleanly to race speed.
The wider New Zealand canoe sprint team had a mixed weekend in Brandenburg. The reorganised men’s group of James Munro, Kurtis Imrie, Hamish Legarth and Grant Clancy raced the K4 500 and split for the K2 500, with Quaid Thompson lining up in the men’s K1 1000 and K1 5000. None broke through to the top of the podium, but the squad is being deliberately tested against the Olympic qualification field that began assembling in Szeged.
The next chance for Fisher and the team to add to the medal tally will come later in the European summer at the Poznan World Cup leg and then the world championships, where K4 quotas for Los Angeles 2028 will start to come into focus. For now, a side wind beaten, a home favourite beaten, and a gold medal heading back to Rotorua.
The bigger picture for New Zealand kayaking is that the post Paris transition is not as fragile as it could have been. Carrington’s absence at the top of the K1 has always been a question waiting to be answered, and a Fisher win on a difficult day at Brandenburg is the kind of answer the programme would have hoped for.
It is also a reminder that depth, not just star power, is what carries a small nation through an Olympic cycle. The K1 gold is Fisher’s, but the K4 ninth, achieved with three weeks of preparation and a forced selection change, is arguably the more useful data point.
What do you make of Aimee Fisher’s Brandenburg gold and the wider state of the New Zealand canoe sprint squad as the team starts the road to Los Angeles 2028? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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