APP World Tour US Open of SUP

Final recap – rise of the young guns

It was quite a weekend in Santa Monica, following along a rather choppy live cast, the racing was great. April Zilg showed the girls who is boss and won all of her sprint heat as well as the longdistance. Connor pulled an amazing rabbit out of his hat like we have not seen in a long time in SUP Racing. I recommend to re watch this in the live cast.

The biggest take away of this weekend however was the rise of the 3 young guns: The 13 year old Soryn Preston booking a 3rd place in the sprint was amazing. In all honesty I never heard her name until this weekend. Evidently I was living under a rock as far as US female talent goes. We have not seen her racing outside the US so far, but I cant wait until that happens. Another huge moment of the young talents was Bodie von Allmen. The youngster from Hoodriver pulled off an amazing 2nd place in the longdistance. I met Bodie last September in Hungary at the ICF SUP Worlds and it already then was clear that this young guy is eager to make his mark in the SUP World. This weekend he did! The third of the young guns this weekend was young Shur “Shrimpy” Araki. He arrived in Santa Monica from Spain where he raced in the World SUP Festival leaving some big names in SUP behind him. This weekend he came in 3rd in the longdistance and 7th in the sprints. These three youngsters had their most lucrative SUP race of their new career.

Congratulations!

Overall results

Day 2 Longdistance

That was quite an unexpected finish of the longdistance race. It was Itzel Delgado and Bode von Allmen who were on the right course beating the expected top guys. It was very foggy on this Sunday and Bode and Itzel took their course near the shore as most other paddlers were going further south away from the shore. This win marks a huge success for Itzel Delgado and probably even bigger was the 2nd place for Bodie von Allmen. The junior paddler from Hoodriver arrived on the international stage with a bang. Also remarkable is the 3rd place of youg Shrimpy from Japan. Having guys like Connor and Danny showing up at the finish line later was not expected and seeing Boothy coming in on 9th place was not what we have expected.

In the field of the ladies April Zilg put the hammer down one more time. She beat Candice Appleby and Stephanie Shideler.

These are the podiums as we are waiting for official results

Day 1 Sprint Races

The first day of the APP US Open at the Santa Monica Pier is in the books. The most epic was not until the very last minutes of the race. It was Connor Baxter who pulled a rabbit out of a hat. He was behind Arthur Arutkin on the final stretch towards the finish line, as Arthur was in the lead for pretty much the entire final round. He caught an inside bump after the last buoy turn and pulled away from Connor surfing towards the beach. Arthur’s wave was building up and he now pulled away from Connor. Arthur was pretty much on the beach but Connor was was able to capitalize on a small bump behind out paddling the wave and catching up to Arthur as he was jumping off his board. Connor now only a few meters behind Arthur manages to out sprint him and winning race by the very few meters he was just behind a few seconds ago. What a picture book finish that was. Go to all the way at the end of the live cast to review this amazing moment.

In the ladies final it was April Zilg dominating the field. In fact she dominated the entire event. Candice Appleby did very well considering she had to come back the final from a 2nd chance round. Fourth place was Juliette Du Haime the young an up coming SUP Athlete. She did her first on only APP tour back in 2019. Most impressive was the 3rd place by Soryn Preston who is only 13 years old. Great work! We are defiantly looking forward to see more of this young talent.

We were a bit surprised by the absence of Esperanza Barreras as she was on the race announcement. It would have been great to see her racing against April and Candice. Missing, but announced was also the current APP World Champion Casper Steinfath. Although in his case we were rather surprised that he was on the list of participants. He just finished a 1200km paddle around Denmark followed by his popular “Red Bull Mid Summer Vikings” a 24 hour charity SUP Paddle. It would have been a miracle to see Casper pulling off a weekend of SUP Racing coming off such intense last few weeks.

We are now looking forward to the long distance race of Sunday, as we are pretty sure that Michael Booth wants to redeem himself big time. Nobody expected not to see him in the finals. He was a big contender for the podium but unfortunately went down in the semi finals and was not able to recover from that.