Saúl Craviotto emerged from the Vaires-sur Marne canal on a hot Thursday in Paris with the aplomb that comes with his status as the high priest of the paddle. He was carrying the medal he had just won, bronze in K-4, the sixth of his career, a figure that corresponds to the most productive medallist in the Olympic history of Spain, and the one that made canoeing, with 23 medals, one more than sailing, the harvesting machine par excellence of Spanish sport at the Games. Few federations can boast of greater stability and efficiency in the stormy constellation that feeds the High Council of Sports with less glory than surprises.
“Things are going very well in the federation and among the coaches, and the foundation is being worked on very well because you see kids with a lot of grit coming out,” said Craviotto. “You see 20-year-old kids with no fear who go into the final with a knife between their teeth to fight for an Olympic medal!”
Craviotto gave his blessing to Joan Antoni Moreno and Diego Domínguez. The 21-year-old from Mallorca and the 20-year-old from Madrid had just won bronze in the 500-metre canoe sprint for two crew members, the C-2, corresponding to the first final of the flat water championship held at the Games. “Man, we’re bronze!” shouted the man from Madrid as he crossed the finish line. His screams left him hoarse. They had just overtaken the Germans, the Hungarians and the Russians under a neutral flag. They got on the podium by nine hundredths of a second. It was so unexpected that until a couple of months ago, those chosen to represent the C-2 in Paris were Tano García and Pablo Martínez, the friends from Seville who won the 2022 World Championship and who they had eliminated in a last-minute selection event. The kind of exhibition that the federation headed by Javier Herranz allows itself, where the competition at the base is effervescent, as Diego Domínguez observed: “In Spain we have the best C-2 in the world because there are four top-level boats. We have been training to prepare the boat since October last year. It is not that much. But when there is power and quality, things go well. If you see Joan’s biceps, that will surely help you understand it! I just steer the boat and little else.”
Joan, who is paddling in front of the canoe, was in charge of avoiding the waves that rose in the middle of the race. An unexpected and decisive obstacle in a sport that is decided by fractions of a centimetre. “When there are waves you try to make your legs stiff,” explained the boat’s driver, “you try to keep your body more upright, slow down your cadence a little, try to find balance and pray that it doesn’t knock you over.”
Water is ambiguous. It is hard and a source of instability. The art of canoeing consists of softening the water and projecting oneself over it in a straight line in the most energetic and balanced way possible until the boat reaches the minimum friction, at the border between the molecules of liquid and air. It takes the brain of an astronaut to manage a minute and a half of racing on a needle-shaped kayak in which four crew members toil. Saúl Craviotto is the administrator who stabilized the emotions of his companions, set the rhythm of the stroke, and guided the engines, the giant Carlos Arévalo and the highly efficient Marcus Cooper, who put the force into the start, and Rodrigo Germade, who acts as helmsman, the one with the greatest tact, who negotiates the most difficult supports because he puts the spoons in the water that his companions have just stirred.
The Spanish kayak team flew at the start of the final. Craviotto and his teammates took the lead by a distance at the 100-metre mark and when they crossed the meridian only Australia, who had just broken the Olympic record in the semi-finals, and Germany could follow them. “Our trump card was the start,” explained the K-4 coach, Miguel García. “Exploiting that first 200m with strength, maintaining the momentum and managing it. What happens is that when you have a headwind the race becomes harder. We knew we had to suffer at the end. The Australians surprised us. They passed us by a tenth because they were more resistant.”
The bodies of the Spaniards, especially Craviotto and Arévalo, are better prepared for speed than for endurance. When lactic acid is triggered, after a minute of action at 100% power, the muscles of the Spanish paddlers can’t take it anymore. Craviotto said that if he bent over on the boat when he found out the final score (bronze with 1m 20.05s, behind Australia with 1m 19.84s and Germany with 1m 19.80s), it wasn’t because of disappointment but because of burnout. “I was screwed,” he said, “not because of the colour of the medal but because it’s 500 metres, and in the 400 I was already kicking in. I was barely getting wet. I wasn’t putting in any strength. I was exhausted. I gave it all my energy. My soul. For me it was a dream final. We came out with determination, as you have to come out in the finals, if you go out speculating with strategies it gets complicated.”
Craviotto was happy. Relieved, even. At 39 years old, experience had told him that the K-4 podium was in danger. “After the semi-final we went to the hangar with our heads down, with doubts,” he admitted. “We had to send each other messages of encouragement: ‘Relax, this isn’t over, we have one more chance.’ We had two hours between the semi-final and the final and questions arose. We ran the qualifying round very well, but in the semi-final four passed, there were five of us, and the typical thing happened, where you relax a little. We didn’t want to waste energy and they gave us a little bit of a beating. The Australians beat us… and the Serbians! That generated doubts: ‘What if I’m not there?’ But an Olympic final is won with your head. The physique is important but the determining factor in sport is the constant battle in your head. You can enter a dangerous loop with two hours to go before the final. So we spent two hours encouraging ourselves with messages. If not, who will encourage us?
“The critical moment”
In a sport that revolves around synchronization, because the opposite of synchrony offers resistance to the water and is a waste of energy, where the paddlers must join together with their hips and arms to act as one man, any kind of anxiety in one of the crew can disrupt the essential harmony. It is not during the race when this happens, but in the hours before. “The critical moment is 20 minutes before the competition,” explains Miguel García, “when you go out to warm up. That is when doubts can make you lose a medal. There the directors are Saúl and Cooper because they control emotions very well. Not only external ones but their own. They know how to focus and channel all the stimuli in a positive way at the key moment. And where there are reasons to doubt, they find reasons to go for it.”
Cormorants and geese flew over the vast, lake-like canal north of Paris. The crowd went wild. The water sport draws boisterous, friendly crowds, especially from Central Europe. “The important thing is that we put on a show,” the veteran observed. “The canoeing enthusiasts get up and enjoy themselves. A bronze medal is a blessing for me.”
At 39 years old and with his sixth medal won, Craviotto spoke with the serenity of someone who has crossed all borders. When asked about the magnitude of his work, he shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t want to be remembered as a guy who won six medals,” he said. “More than the medals, what I value most about my career is having been in Beijing, London, Tokyo and Paris. There are many years between cycles, and being at the top, at the top, at the top… I have never given importance to the number of medals. There are athletes who aspire to three, four or five medals in the Games. And there are sports like taekwondo or weightlifting in which you only aspire to one. Who is the best athlete? I have never liked rankings. I would like my legacy to be one of struggle and perseverance. That’s it.”
The high priest of canoeing put away his paddle and went on holiday with his daughters and parents. He said he would use the break to think about his future. “I might decide to hold on for another year,” he said, “or maybe when I come back from holiday I’ll get in the canoe and say: it’s over!”
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