It’s not every day that you get to learn from a world bronze medallist. But last week, Yukon paddlers got to spend hours every day with one.

Zachary Zwanenburg won bronze at the 2015 world championships in the Ottawa Valley last summer. He was in Whitehorse last week hosting training sessions with Yukon paddlers at the Spin Wave, downstream of the dam, as well as a few other locations.

“They’ve got an amazing feature here, so it gives an awesome place to train and paddle,” said Zwanenburg.

“Everyone’s been doing well and have been learning really fast so I’m really impressed.”

After a week of sessions, Zwanenburg hosted a casual freestyle rodeo at the Spin Wave.

He was awarding points for a variety of moves, including some old-school favourites like the air guitar and the paddle twirl.

Paddler Marc Pronovost took full advantage of the range of moves, trying to link up his air guitar with some of the more complex tricks he’d been practicing during the week.

He was very impressed with Zwanenburg’s coaching and called it “phenomenally good.”

“I’m very impressed,” he said. “I never thought I’d stick any of those moves before the sessions and it might be by luck, but I was able to do one of each and that’s more than I would have ever expected.”

Pronovost was sticking loops, space godzillas (loop with a 180-degree turn), felixes and pirouettes.

Zwanenburg is a well-rounded paddler and a former junior national slalom team member. He also paddles on steep, difficult creeks and has travelled across Europe to compete.

In 2015 he competed in front of a home crowd on the Ottawa River to win his first-ever world championship medal.

Earlier this summer he qualified for the Canadian freestyle paddling team in three different classes: C-1, open C-1 and kayak.