Fun little clip of the SIC crew’s recent trip to Mexico for the Punta Sayulita Classic, where team riders Georges Cronsteadt and Lina Augaitis dominated the event. The two world beaters each made a clean sweep, taking out their respective Elite and Distance Races.
As always with SIC clips there’s some cool aerial shots and great race footage mixed in with some words from the paddlers themselves, so sit back and enjoy (and check out the carange at the 55 second mark…). → READ MORE
Results are in from the Punta Sayulita Classic in Mexico and it looks like the weekend belonged to Team SIC. Taking out both events (the Surf Race on Saturday and 10k Distance Race on Sunday) was Georges Cronsteadt of Tahiti, while teammate Lina Augaitis from Canada was too strong on the women’s side.
In the Surf Race, Georges was the only paddler to make it clean to the first buoy, as a set swept through the field right after the start. From there, the Tahitian big guy controlled the waves and the race to finish around half a minute clear. Sayulita locals Ryan Helm and Fernando Stalla filled the men’s podium, with Ryan overtaking Fernando on the sprint up the beach to the line. Meanwhile Shelby Dela Rosa Taylor and Kristin Thomas took second and third respectively on the women’s. → READ MORE
So who wants to get on a SUP podium? Now’s probably a good time to have a crack at it, because the five best paddlers in the world are all carrying injuries and are all officially out of action at the moment.
In what is an amazing yet unfortunate coincidence, Connor Baxter, Travis Grant, Danny Ching, Kai Lenny and Georges Cronsteadt – aka the top five guys in our Top 13 of 2013 list – have all suffered problems at the same time. Fortunately for these five guys (and unfortunately for everyone else) it’s the off season right now, meaning there aren’t really any big races that you could jump in on and magically gain five positions on the leaderboard.
The SUP racing “season” (if such a thing exists in our sport) roughly runs for seven months between mid-March to mid-October. All these guy got injured in late 2013, giving them a few months to recover and get back in shape before the big races start rolling again.
The injuries for Travis and Georges are the most serious, with up to six months recovery time, while the others should be back within a month or two. Though it’s worth noting that all these injuries were NOT caused by the normal stresses of Stand Up Paddling; they mostly happened while free surfing, except for Georges, who was just plain out of luck during the Battle of the Paddle. So here’s wishing the world’s finest a speedy recovery. But what exactly happened? Here’s a closer look… → READ MORE
