APP Tour Viana SUP Open Results

Longdistance

It was the moment the SUP World was anticipating: Duna Gordillo beat Esperanza Barreras in her strongest discipline. Duna Gordillo finished the longdistance course in 1:43:34 and Esperanza Barreras in 1:43:57. These two ladies were a class on their own as the 3rd place with Mariecarmen Rivera was 4 minutes behind.

On the men side it was Shuri Araki (Shripmy) and Rai Taguchi who came in first and second not far from each other. Shrimpys’ time was 1:28:54 and Rais’ was 1:29:20. Only 18 seconds on third was Connor Baxter. Connor who specializes in sprints was looking rather strong.

We can hope that we will see more ladies joining the APP as there are names out there who have a good potential to make podiums. We are looking forward to see how this race moves the needle on the SUP World Rankings.

Sprints

The sprint race could not have been more interesting. However, evidently the APP is not reading the Stand Up Magazin as they are holding a Tech. Race and call it a sprint. We dissected and explained the difference back in May and you can read and watch here.

Apart from that these kind of races could not be more exciting. The race amongst buoys make for interesting lead changes and off course also people fall in the water. In this case it was Connor Baxter taking a fall in the mens’ final. What looks like a normal “racing is rubbing” kind of situation to the untrained eye turned out to be a violation of the rules.

We see how Connor gets wedged between Christian Andersen in white and Aaron Sanchez in blue who is fighting to keep his balance.

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Aaron Sanchez is still sitting on Connors tail, as Christian Andersen now squeezing on the inside. This causes Connor to loose his balance.

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Now Connor is in the water and Aaron is just hanging on.

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About a second later Aaron goes down as well and Christian Andersen now has an open race course.

We have re watched this moment over and over trying to figure out what happened and where the foul play exactly was. Frankly is was Connors duty to collect additional footage from the spectators to make the case of a rule violation. It took the APP and their team a good hour of back and forth even looking at footage of past races to finally determine that Aaron and Christian must be penalized one minute.

Situations like this do happen and deserve the attention and must be resolved. The fact, that it takes an organization who claims to be the Association of SUP Professional over an hour of back and forth is not making anybody looking very professional. Particularly if the decision making judge is not even on site. We been covering the APP since their existence and it does not take much to exactly envision how that all went down at the beach. If the APP had clear rules and knew the difference between a Sprint Race and a Tech. Race there would be no disagreements.

Uncertainties create anxieties amongst competitors and suck out the good energy an event like this has. It also takes away from the great performance of the ladies.

The ladies final was nothing short of exciting. Caroline Küntzel got off the beach extremely fast and lead to the first buoy. She was paddling so hard that she leaned over a bit too much and lost her balance and fell. This gave Julitte DuHaime a huge advantage who lead the race for the rest of the course. Sadly Caroline was not able to recover from this mistake and remained in fourth.

Final heat results

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If you like to re watch the live cast from the sprints you can do so right here. The video will start the mens’ sprint final.