Kayaking's Wildest Competition - Outside Magazine
Kayaking’s Wildest Competition The Whitewater Grand Prix is paddling's most insane event, a scrappy, alcohol-soaked gauntlet that sends competitors down some of the most fearsome rapids in the world. Underneath a highway bridge in the town of Dolbeau-Mistassini, 40,000 cubic feet per second—almost half the flow of Niagara Falls—rush through a narrow gap and then plunge over a jagged line of granite bedrock ribs. Oceanic waves, some more than ten feet high and 70 feet wide, rise and break, and the river implodes into churning pits of whitewater known simply as Bridge Rapid. The kayakers are in town for the third edition of the world’s toughest whitewater competition, the 2014 Whitewater Grand Prix , a grueling two-week, six-event contest designed to anoint the world’s best all-around paddler. Bridge Rapid is too dangerous even for the Grand Prix—at this flow, it’s one of the biggest in the world—but that fact hasn’t deterred roughly half the field from considering a run at it. Today is not an official stage, and the only thing at stake... While the paddlers huddle on the bridge for an hour, discussing tactics and routes and ratcheting up courage, the Grand Prix’s photographers and. Source: www.outsideonline.com
