Thun 1st day prelims

Another day, another competition! The wave at Thun is set against a picturesque backdrop in a pretty Swiss town. The feature is a fun, smallish wave but quite difficult to get anything vertical (its difficult for me, though the guys make it look quite easy) as the wave is quite flat, it also seems to lack any shoulders and it can deal out some random (and sometimes not so random) flushes. 

We had just 3 days to get used to the wave (although the first day the wave was still being tweaked and during our last practice session the wave was greening out and was different to that on competition day) and I wasn’t feeling very ready to compete in prelims yesterday. Everyone except the men were up yesterday and unfortunately 4 rides (as the wave was unattainable) and a whole lot of flushing was fairly dull to stay watching for the whole lot, especially whilst waiting to compete late in the afternoon. There were certainly some really exciting rides every now and then though, including the junior men where there seemed to be a fair amount of air to be had and was won by Sebastien Devred (Fra) with a huge 833 points. 

Emily Wall clean-spinning, just missing out on semis. 

The ladies were finding it hard to throw blunts and rides mainly consisted of roundhouses, back roundhouses and flat moves. There were also a few blunts and my air blunt in my 2^nd ride helped me to 2^nd place just behind Ruth Gordon who was getting some really nice back stabs. Emily Jackson took 3^rd place heading to semis. The other British ladies didn’t make the cut and Emily Wall only just missed out on the top 10 by 3 points (I remember that – I was there last week!) and Claire O’Hara just 3 points behind her, so there were some really close scores.

Dave Bainbridge cleaning it to take 1st in C1.

In the C1 Dave Bainbridge (GB) was going huge as always with some big pan ams and clean back blunts. He took 1st place with Dane Jackson (US) 2nd and Lee Pyke (GB) had some good rides to put him in 3rd.

Today its men’s prelims, there are a lot of paddlers and a lot of heats – 328 rides to judge apparently, I’m glad I’m not a judge!