Battle for Hercules SUP Race Results

It’s Happening: The Long-Awaited SUPER SUP EURO SPRING Tour Kicks Off

The long-awaited SUPER SUP EURO SPRING Tour has officially kicked off with the Battle for Hercules! This marks the first of six races taking place across Europe. Each event offers significant prize money, giving the elite athletes a chance to earn a decent amount over the next six weekends.

This weekend’s opener turned into a mostly Spanish affair particularly on the women side and below the top 10. We were surprised to see quite a few familiar names missing from the start line. Notably, the Japanese elite racers have yet to arrive, and no prominent Italian paddlers were seen either — along with a few others absent. Despite the incomplete elite roster, the first day in Benalmádena delivered plenty of suspense, especially with the Tech Race, one of our favorite disciplines. A beach start added extra excitement, while small waves rolling onto shore created an additional challenge for the competitors.

With a €4,000 prize purse for the Tech Race, the competition was fierce. First place earned €675, and prize money was paid out down to fifth place.

Windy Finals Test the Racers

On the men’s side, Fernando Perez put in a strong performance, battling closely with Christian Andersen before managing to steal the lead. In a crucial moment at the second-to-last buoy, Christian fell into the water, sealing the victory for Fernando.

Men Results

Among the women, it was Duna Gordillo who claimed the win over Esperanza Barreras in an exciting final. Espe led during the first lap, but Duna stayed close behind and nearly overtook her during the beach run. It turned into a head-to-head battle between the two Spanish racers, with Csilla Kocsis holding a safe third place throughout. At the second-to-last buoy, Duna finally managed to pass Espe and defended her lead all the way to the finish, earning herself €675.

Women Results

Longdistance Men

Donato Freens showed solid strength in Longdistance, he got his victory 4 seconds ahead of Arthur Arutkin and 8 seconds ahead of Aaron Sanchez. The race times make it clear the top 4 racers were all pretty close and in a great battle for some price money.

Women Longdistance

Alba Frey is a bit of a surprise winner on the women side as we expected Duna Gordillo and Esperanze Barreras being the ones to battle for gold, but this time we had Alba in the mix. Looking at the race times, it is clear that Alba, Duna and Espe set the pace head. Csillag Kocsis was not able to keep up with the top 3 and came in 19 seconds behind but also more than two minutes ahead of the rest of the field.

Price money and conclusion

The concentration of price money reveals that the talent amongst the women is more concentrated than with the men. All three top ladies walked away with more money than the top earners on the men side. The price money on the men side was split amongst 7 athletes and on the women side there were 6 athletes.

In our opinion we would have rather split the price money amongst the top 3 and not all the way down to the 5th place. If the amount of price money is enough is open for debate. There are people out there who think its by far not enough and while we can agree that it would be great to have more price money we have to acknowledge that there are no more funds available. One thing seems interesting is the difference in price money: The second place gets € 175 less than the first while the third only gets €125 less than the second, after that it is €100 less per rank. We think the price money should have been more concentrated on the top three.

It also appears that the ESL put quite a big sticker on this race and by looking at the podium pictures we assume it was them coming up with the price money. Why else would their logo be on the check? We did have a nice interview with Daniel Parres who is at the forefront of the you can read that here. We hope they will continue to give out price money like this and more in the future.

It would also be great if they would put some more budget into the live cast and provide totalSUP Matieu with a camera man and an actual production team, so we don’t have to watch it in vertical mode filmed from a phone and get some more camera angles.

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