Photo by Photo Submitted
PROUD MOMENT – Pelly Vincent-Braun made Yukon history in Brazil last month. The whitewater paddler was the first territorial athlete to crack Canada’s national junior slalom roster. Photo courtesy of TREVOR BRAUN
Paddler returns from worlds
He was never in the medal hunt, but Pelly Vincent-Braun “learned tons” at the junior world championships in Brazil last month.
He was never in the medal hunt, but Pelly Vincent-Braun “learned tons” at the junior world championships in Brazil last month.
The 16-year-old whitewater paddler completed his competition last Saturday in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, where he was competing for Team Canada.
His final race was as a member of the Under-23 C-1 (solo canoe) men’s team race, which saw three Canuck boats racing together.
Vincent-Braun raced alongside teammates Ben Risk and Liam Smedley, finishing 12th out of 13 teams.
While Vincent-Braun and Risk would have qualified in the junior race, they were the only two juniors on a 16-member Team Canada and so teamed up with Smedley in the older age group.
Trevor Braun, coach of the Yukon Canoe and Kayak Club, said his son gave it his all.
Vincent-Braun’s first individual competition saw him capsize multiple times, leading to missed gates and a 37th place finish out of 43 paddlers in the C-1 junior men’s category.
“Pelly raced hard and went all out,” Braun said of his son’s efforts. “He was doing very well on the top half of the course, moving fast and clean and getting through the tricky gates.
“However, he flipped mid-course which caused him to miss two gates – a 50-second penalty for each.”
On his second run, the Yukoner flipped again – this time a little further down the course, where he missed another pair of gates.
Slalom racing involves racing through a set of gates on a whitewater course.
Courses typically involve more than 20 gates – including six upstream, with penalties of two seconds for touching them, or 50 seconds for a miss.
Vincent-Braun was the first Yukon whitewater paddler to crack Canada’s national junior slalom roster.
Others have cracked the national freestyle team roster, but never in slalom.
For his efforts, he was named Sport Yukon’s national/territorial male athlete of the year in 2014.
The 2015 International Canoe Federation World Championships featured 300-plus athletes from 45 different countries.
Vincent-Braun, who is named after the Pelly River, could not be reached for comment on this story.
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