Needless to say, that some of us who have been in the sport for a long time were quite surprised to see a post coming through our feed from no other than SUP Racer. Notably the last Facebook post of SUP Racer was back in July of 2023. My last sign of live from Chris Parker was shortly after our town here in Lahaina was pretty much wiped out by a wild fire. Before that Chris and I agreed to do a weekly SUP Show to be broadcasted via youtube.
It was pretty much a year ago when Chris and I reminisced on the future of the SUP Sport and the impact of the flat water culture on the beloved Surf Culture the SUP Sport was born out of.
Sadly this was our last talk and I never heard from Chris again. Until now when we saw the post on SUP Racer talking about… well pretty much the same we been talking about for a long time.
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The article was written by Betsy Ray, that is the person who bought SUP Racer from Chris Parker almost two years ago. Now the radio silence is over and we see an online post that is ironically pretty much picking up were we left things off almost one year ago: The good old discussion about the Canoe world and the SUP sport. Sadly Chris Parker retired for good now, but SUP Racer lives on through Betsy.
The interesting part in this article is, that it frankly took quite a bit of pressure and over 50K signups to get the UK Canoe Federation to rebrand into a more inclusive name “Paddle UK”. Particularly before the background that the ICF has been putting lots of energy into the SUP Sport. According to SUP Junkie Sarah Thornely who was instrumental in the change, told SUP Racer (Betsy Ray) the following:  “There were a lot of people who thought it wasn’t going to change. It’s a bit of a grey-suited old boys club.”
It will take too long to get into the details of what was written and we encourage you to read it for your self. However we may conclude that the inclusion of SUP in the Canoe world is farther away than we might think and given the efforts by multiple individuals to get SUP into canoe organizations rather than surfing organizations should be a wake up call for the ISA who after all still holds the key to the Olympics. Sadly not the ones in 2028 in Los Angeles but who knows maybe 2032 in Brisbane.