Your daily outdoor news bulletin for September 9, the day Congress changed the name of their fledgling country from “United Colonies” to “United States” in 1776 after much debate and comparison by our Founding Fathers, who chanted “UCA!” and “USA!” long into the night before making their final decision:
US Cleans Up at Worlds
Speaking of the good old UCA, the team cleaned up at the ICF Canoe Freestyle World Championships that went down last week at the Nantahala Outdoor Center in North Carolina. The U.S. men’s team swept the men’s C1 – the C stands for canoe, the 1 stands for awesomeness – taking gold, silver and bronze. Jordan Poffenberger took the top spot with Blue Ridge boaters Tad Dennis of Charlotte, North Carolina and Dane Jackson of Rock Island, Tennessee taking silver and bronze respectively. Jackson followed up his bronze in C1 with a gold in K1 – K stands for Kayak, 1 still stands for awesomeness – beating out the best Europe has to offer, and a silver in the Squirt Finals. Poffenberger and Jackson also went 1-2 respectively in the Open Canoe finals.
On the women’s side, 17-year-old Stecoah, N.C. native Rowan Stuart won gold in the junior women’s kayak. Although she did not make it into the finals, we spoke with Army Vet, and squirt-boater Tracy Click at the games. Check out the story here.
Click here for the full listing of results.
Nyad Cuba Swim Not Winning Over Skeptics
If you haven’t heard by now, long distance swimming champ Diana Nyad completed the first open water swim from Cuba to Florida without the use of a shark cage. This is a significant achievement for all the obvious reason – distance, open water, 53-hours in the briny, SHARKS, fifth attempt, etc. – but maybe most incredible is the fact that Nyad is 64 years old. This being the digital age and all, here swim was tracked via GPS, live blog, and such, which of course now has the blogosphere all atwitter. It seems that Nyad’s contemporaries in the marathon swimmers community are questioning the feat due to inconsistencies in the GPS data and whether she left the water to get into, or held onto the side, of one of her support boats. She did this once before due to bad weather, only revealing it after the fact, and this being the digital age and all, anyone with half a brain, a keyboard, and access to the Marathon Swimmers Forum (YES, it does exist), can call you out. Nyad has agreed to meet with her detractors, so we’ll see what comes of the Super Skeptical Swimmers Summit 2013.
Here is a blog on Slate.com with all the appropriate links, so you can get both sides of this story.
Tokyo Will Host 2020 Olympic Games
Speaking of achievements nobody really believes or cares about (HAHA, just kidding wrestling!) Tokyo will host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, beating out Madrid and Istanbul for the honor. The announcement came as a bit of a surprise to the international community for several reasons. 1 – that whole nuclear meltdown/earthquake thing, 2 – Japan has been mired in a protracted economic slump for the past 15 years, so investing $6 billion in Games may not be the best idea, and 3 – well, they have hosted the games a couple other times (Tokyo in ’64 and the Winter Nagano Games in ’98), while vying against two cities with zero (though to be fair, Spain’s economic situation is much worse than Japan’s and Turkey has some political issues to deal with, mainly being the first Muslim country to host the games, and also their border with Syria). Now, you can make the case that the games could be a shot in the arm to Japan, both for the economy and the morale of the aging populace, and this may be true as the buildup is long, and the games are still over seven years away. So yeah, Tokyo 2020 could work out.
Got a hot news tip? Shoot an email to [email protected]
