Kayaking: Fouhy soaking up inspiration

By EUGENE BINGHAM

In the wake of his stunning world championship kayaking victory, a frazzled Ben Fouhy approached weightlifting gold medallist Nigel Avery.

"He was quite overwhelmed with the attention," recalls Avery. "All of a sudden, everybody wanted a piece of him. He came and asked me about how I dealt with that side of things and we talked through a few things."

It is a pattern the K1 1000m Olympic gold-medal favourite has repeated often in the past year.

In the build-up to these games, he has approached Avery, gold-medal rower Rob Waddell, canoeist Paul McDonald and 1960 Olympic champion runner Sir Murray Halberg, soaking up ideas, advice and inspiration.

"If the race is won and lost before you get to the startline, I want to make sure I've done everything as best I can," Fouhy, 25, said this week.

To become a champion, Fouhy has sought out champion advice.

It has been a mark of his approach to sport since Fouhy, one of the pipsqueaks at Palmerston North Boys High School and Taumarunui High School, ditched rugby for running, cycling and multisport.

He devoured tips and hints from running and cycling magazines and became a disciple of Arthur Lydiard, reading about the legendary coach's principles and applying them to his training ever since.

His hero was Steve Gurney, New Zealand's multi-sport king, and at Palmerston North Boys he was fed stories of a former pupil, a bloke called Ian Ferguson, four-times gold medal-winning canoeist.

During the gruelling Coast to Coast race in 2001, scrambling over rocks and down the rapids of the Southern Alps, Fouhy reached a crossroads. He finished at Sumner Beach in a thoroughly creditable 15th place, 14 spots behind Gurney, but it was not enough. He craved to be at the front, the winner.

When Fouhy wants to do something, he wants to be the best and to be surrounded by the best. He heard that some of the best marathon paddlers in the world were living in Melbourne, so he packed his bags and headed across the ditch. He dossed on his brother's floor for six months and learned the secrets of his new sport, marathon paddling, from champions.

He came third at the Australian championships in 2002. Around the same time, Fouhy had been invited to join the New Zealand sprint kayaking squad. The invitation had come from none other than Ferguson, so, after an ill-fated marathon paddling trip to Europe, he came back home to take up another opportunity to learn from a champion.

Within a year, Ferguson had honed his new charge's paddling technique and added speed on top of the endurance base built by years of Lydiard-style training. Fouhy became world champion in the K1 1000m and loomed as the favourite for Athens. Together with Ferguson's son Steven he also qualified for the K2 1000m.

With success at last his - finally he had found what he craved for on Sumner Beach - Fouhy threw himself into training at Lake Pupuke on the North Shore. Thanks to sponsorship, he gave up his job as a builder, and became a training fiend.

Gordon Walker, a multi-sport competitor and mate of Fouhy's, said that away from paddling, Fouhy was a real joker.

"He has a good sense of humour and anyone can walk up and talk to him. But when it comes time to train, no one gets in his way on the lake.

"When he wants to talk to you about something like his training, he is extremely intense."

Others describe Fouhy's attitude as fastidious and say he is a perfectionist to the point of being selfish in his approach to training and competing.

Walker said that Fouhy simply wanted to know that he was preparing as best he could.

"He would be the only person who would complete a whole training programme and he would do it to the letter."

But it is not a case of blindly following a programme given to him.

Fouhy will consult people about his training programmes, including Auckland University of Technology physiologist Darrell Bonetti.

"It's not enough to say, 'Here you go, Ben, go do these 500s at this pace', - he'd need to know why and for what benefit," said Walker.

Fouhy's approaches to past Olympic champions, such as Waddell, were another example of how he covered every base.

"Ben definitely doesn't have the nonchalant confidence that Steven Ferguson exudes. He gets his self-belief from his detail-oriented approach to the sport and the knowledge that he is the best-prepared athlete on the start line."

For the past few months, Fouhy has been in Europe with girlfriend Katie Pocock, herself a paddler. He trained and raced in England with Sydney bronze medallist Tim Brabants (whom Fouhy beat in the English nationals), and raced in two world cup events in June.

In the first, he came third and was a bit disappointed, even though he had just come off a stretch of base training and paddled faster than he had to win his world championship title.

The next week, in Duisburg, Germany, he was part of the fastest race ever held.

"I wanted to practise getting into the race early, getting as close to the leaders as I could in that first 500m."

Over the last 250m, he noticed he was still in touch with the leaders and so turned on the pace again, recording the same time for the last quarter of the race as he did for the first.

Eirik Veras Larsen cracked the eight-year-old world record with 3m 24.920s, Nathan Baggaley was second, and Fouhy third. His time of 3m 25.773s was a personal best and qualified him for kayaking's elite club of paddlers who have recorded 3m 25s - only five men have done it. With the work he has been doing in the Czech Republic for a month with Ferguson, he is confident he can go faster still.

The trio of paddlers, with Canadian Adam Van Koeverden, have emerged as the most likely men to dominate the Olympic race. Fouhy feels the pressure of being world champion, noticing that people are reacting to the threat posed by the Kiwi unheard of two years ago.

"But I've always thought that if you paddle the best race you can, that's all that matters, regardless of what other people are thinking. If I do my best race, then no matter what they do, they have to paddle faster than me to beat me."

They just could be the words of a champion.

BEN FOUHY

EVENT: K1 1000m, and K2 1000m with Steven Ferguson

BORN: March 1979, Pukekohe

EDUCATED: Palmerston North Boys High and Taumarunui High School

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: 2001: 111th NZ Ironman, 10h 27m, 15th Coast to Coast

3rd Australian Marathon Kayaking Championships, 13th World Cup Marathon Kayaking, Denmark, 1st K1 500m and K1 1000m North Island sprint championships

1st place K1 1000m World Championship, Gainesville, Georgia, 4th place K2 1000m World Championship with Ferguson

June 2004: 3rd place World Cup regatta, Duisburg, Germany.