Rowing: Kayakers keen to paddle in same direction as elite rowers

Fred Teear (left) and Mike Walker of New Zealand's K4 kayaking team go up against the rowers yesterday at Lake Karapiro. Photo / Christine Cornege

The success of an initiative that has had a kayaking K4 train alongside the vaunted national rowing programme could see a push to relocate Canoe Racing New Zealand's base to Lake Karapiro.

Over the past five weeks the recently formed K4 of Mike Walker, Darryl Fitzgerald, Liam O'Loughlin and Fred Teear have lived together at Cambridge and had access to Rowing New Zealand's training models and sports science.

It's been an eye-opener for the experienced Walker, 33, who competed in the K2 at the Beijing Olympics, seeing athletes rowing more than 50km a day.

"They're full-time athletes, whereas I'm trying to squeeze work into my life as well, but it's been interesting trying to implement some of their training models."

It could yet prove to be an even bigger eye opener for Sparc.

The Government funding agency is anxious to use the country's sports resources in a smarter way.

"Long term, we see it would make sense to have a canoe racing programme based at Karapiro," Sparc high-performance manager Marty Toomey said.

There would, he said, be an opportunity for the two programmes to share sports science and technology around boats and fluid dynamics.

"We think there are synergies between sports," Toomey said. "We're small in a sporting sense, we've got to be smart enough to pick things up off each other if we want to be successful."

It was, however, premature to say when and, ultimately, if such a concept was at all possible.

One of the drawbacks of CRNZ's current set-up was the limitations of Lake Pupuke.

"If you're in the K4 and want to crank it up and get some speed, you don't want to have to stop and turn around all the time," Toomey said.

Of more immediate concern to Walker, however, is the upcoming European campaign, which starts with a world cup race in Vichy, France, early next month.

Under the guidance of Gisborne-based Hungarian coach Andras Szabo, the K4 had made enough progress in a short time to convince the 33-year-old to make the gut-wrenching decision to leave his young family for months on end.

Yesterday, racing alongside the men's four and an under-23 lightweight four, Walker said they were clocking 3m 15s kilometres over 5000m.

"A three-minute [kilometre] is the benchmark for the K4. If you can't do that you won't get anywhere, so ... if we are holding 3m 15s over five, we're doing pretty well."