Forward Motion in action again

17 September 2014

Two years ago I wrote about the Dutch team “Forward Motion” and their uniqueness in having a mixed team. It still hasn’t changed. :) We chat to them again about their upcoming plans.

Jenita, your participation at the 2012 Youth World Rafting Champs in Czech was one of the reasons I chatted to you last time, but what has been happening in the meantime?

“In the last 2 years a lot has happened. We still have the same team, but we did try to find more people so that we could join the R6 competitions as well. Unfortunately we had some injury problems with 2 of our members last year and so we had to change the team and start all over again. The good thing was that we always found someone to join us in the competitions and this made us a bigger team after all. At the moment we have 6 boys and 3 girls from around Holland who like to raft, so 9 people in total.”

We didn’t introduce them by name last time, so we will do it this time:

Marijn Klerks, Jenita Gobel, Marleen de Goede, William van Straalen, Paul Ligtenberg, Bart Peeters, Lisa Ahsmann, Willem Lentz and Pim van Heesch.

What new competitions have you been to this year?

“The only new competition for us this year was the Euro Cup in Austria at the end of April. We really enjoyed it because it is bigger than the races in Holland, and the experience we had during the downriver was great. We have never had a battle with 4 teams from the start to finish before, or slalom at night. I’m pretty sure we will go to Austria again for the Euro Cup in Wildalpen.”

That is nice to hear. The contest is really well organized and on a beautiful river. What are your plans for the next period?

“The next period is pretty short actually. September we will try to train as much as possible with each other, because we haven’t seen much of each over the last 2 months, and prepare for the World Championships in Brazil. We will go to Brazil in October and join the Junior men’s division with a mixed team. After that there probably won’t be any competitions for us until spring 2015″

It will be interesting to see if the experiences you have collected up so far will help you in preparing for the upcoming competition.

Trips like the one to the WRC in Brasil are always something special as well as it being a privilege to participate in such competition. What are your expectations for this competition? In what way are you preparing for this trip and is there anything in particular you want to see and experience there?

“Like 2 years ago we have no clue what to expect from the WRC. Teams change, some of them definitely get better and some of them probably had to change there team composition like we did. Plus what I saw on the list of participants was a lot of teams we have never seen rafting before. This makes it, for us, a unpredictable race.

We only made our final decision to go to the WRC in July this year so our preparation time for this event was and still is pretty short. We did some training in France on the Durance, because we had 3 of our members working there for the summer season. And after that we came together in Holland, where we are trying to do some training on the flat water of the artificial course of Dutch Water Dreams at least 2 or 3 times a week.

I think that joining the WRC in Brazil is a great experience by itself already. Besides our races we would love to see the Open men’s and women’s competition. And we probably will visit the Iguaçu National Park with the Itaipu Dam and of course the waterfalls.”

Yes, the location of the WRC is beautiful and there’s plenty to see and experience. But every dream is often only made possible by sponsors who helped. Who would you like to thank?

We would like to thank the following companies for helping us out with sponsoring material or offering us a training location:

You can follow the teams on their facebook page as well.

It’s great you are going to be in Brasil competing. Have good strokes boys and girls.