Originally featured in Outer Edge magazine.
A mass of chattering eight-year-olds guided by a gnarly looking crusty blonde dude with skin the colour of aged oak run down the beach with lifesaving caps tied in neat bows under their chins. They head straight in without hesitation; duck diving under a vicious shore break before popping up out the back, one-by-one, easy as penguins.
Like prodigies put in front of a piano to recite Beethoven, kids who instinctively love the ocean quickly learn to enjoy its thrills – indeed, they often end up exploring it for the rest of their lives.
Lachlan Tame, a 23-year-old paddler from the mid New South Wales coast, joined Avoca surf club as a five year old. In 2011 he broke through to win the Australian Open single ski championships then doubled up, winning it again in 2012. His confidence buoyed, he decided to have a crack at national team qualification for the K1 200 sprint and the gruelling K1 1000 paddle races at the recent Olympic kayak selection trials.
“I had a bet with a mate I’d make the Olympics,” he says with a grin. “I didn’t make it, but he needed the five bucks, so I figured it was a win/win.
“I was focusing on the 200 metres which takes about 30 seconds, but I’d also been training for the surf race which is about four minutes, about the same as the 1000 metres, so I just gave that a go too,” he shrugs.
Almost as an afterthought, he remembers another detail about sprinting one kilometre in a kayak without waves to run on. It’s an important point, one we end up discussing at length: “It hurt. It hurt a lot.”
The K1 1000 is renowned as an exquisitely painful race; one of those events where the body becomes so loaded with lactic acid it loses all semblance of orderly conduct. The brain seems to lose interest in anything but immediately stopping. Of course, it’s typically halfway through a race, so stopping’s not an option. The brain counteracts the willful disobedience by flushing the muscles with more of the stupefying acid. The pain level thereby increases until the end.
Athletes preparing for this type of race undergo a training program that’s designed to mimic race conditions – namely reproducing the body’s exposure to lactic acid over and over again. In this way, the body adapts and learns to tolerate the pain, increasing its lactic acid tolerance threshold. It’s said the very best athlete’s – people like 14-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps for instance, have an extraordinarily high tolerance to giddying quantities of lactic acid. Some are born with an ear for music; others are born to deal with acid.
Lachlan, or Loccy as he prefers to be called, says his best attribute is his natural competitiveness. Rather than be daunted by the pain or the pressure of big-time competitions, he says he quite enjoys the experience of racing.
“I’ve got a good attitude to racing,” he says bluntly. “You’re there to race and win, but you’ve got to be comfortable in yourself and relaxed and not freak out.
“That’s the massive part of competitive kayaking – I’d never done a K1 1000 before nationals this year and I’ve gone down and lined up for the heat and I tell you, it’s quite a thing to look down a kilometre straight with buoys on each side marking out your racing lane and think about what it is you’re about to do.”
The pain of racing is a fascinating principle to discuss. It’s one of those things spectators take delight in watching from the bleachers, steaming hot coffee in hand, turning to their mate with a wince of mock agony. The Germans call it schadenfreude – the delight in recognising the suffering of another as you kick back, safe as houses.
I put this audience sadism to Loccy, and ask if he has some sort of strategy or plan to keep himself calm and focused while surrounded by people waiting to watch him suffer for their edification.
“I just go as hard as I can at the start – you’ve got to use that initial freshness at the start – then it’s a matter of easing off a bit and finding a rhythm in the middle then trying to have a bit of a pick-up at the end,” he says, seemingly unconcerned at the prospect of being scrutinised by a baying mass of hot dog and popcorn eaters looking for titillation.
“That first 10 to 15 seconds gets you about 80 metres down the course, that’s when it hits you in the lungs so you lengthen your stroke otherwise your arms and shoulders will blow up,” he says. “Then at about 700 metres it hits you in the legs, it’s quite surprising for a sport where you’re sitting down, but I could barely walk after the nationals K1 1000 final. It was quite a shock.”
Kayaking is hardly a headline Olympic sport. Swimming for instance, also a discipline taught at surf clubs, is a more familiar event to most. Yet Australia has a proud and distinguished history in flat-water kayaking, maybe not as distinguished as swimming, or even athletics, but quite illustrious nonetheless.
At Barcelona in 1992 Clint Robinson, another who progressed from five-year-old surf lifesaving club nipper pipsqueak to bona-fide iconic bronzed Aussie surf champion, won gold in the K1 1000. Before him, surf lifesaving legend Grant Kenny won bronze at the 1984 Los Angeles games. In 2008 Gold Coast life saver Ken Wallace won gold in the K1 500 and bronze in the K1 1000. All these successes came with much less money than that available to big Olympic sports and from far smaller representative teams.
Australia is fortunate to have a unique proving ground that allows surf lifesaving junior ski paddlers to smoothly transit into Olympic standard flat water kayaking. In Europe for example, Olympic representatives start of as juniors in kayaks on flat water and progress up through the ranks as normal. In Australia, nippers are introduced to the sea just out of nappies; develop a love for all things surfing, then some naturally gravitate towards kayaking, lured by the call of the Olympics. There’s more than one way to make it as a kayaker in Australia – the traditional way, and the surf club way.
It’s a path Grant Kenny pioneered back in the early 80s when he was dominating the competitive ironman scene. He was among the first to recognise the similarities between surf and flat-water paddling. He saw an opportunity to fully demonstrate the attributes of a formative athletic background provided by local surf clubs to an Olympic audience. Fast-forward 30 years and five of the seven male kayakers chosen to represent Australia in London have a surf club background.
Loccy is part of the next generation of surf life savers on the scent for Olympic glory. Big, bronzed, tanned and possessing the goofy humor popular among surfers, they tend to stand out from those who’ve gone through more formal traditional programs – such as those at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra or similar type of training program in Europe. When he’s not training or at work as a builder, Loccy’s off surfing with his mates.
“Work and surfing keeps me in good physical shape,” he explains. “It’s just something I love doing so it’s no drama, training and competition are actually refreshing in a way because it nicely balances out with work and the relaxed nature of surfing.
“Kayaking is a very neat and contrived sport in a way, very unlike the smash and bash of surf – everything has to be perfect and rhythmical, like a metronome.
“It’s extremely technical and very much based around form and correct actions so you always have to be thinking and refining things,” he adds. “I tend to become mesmerised by the front of the craft when it’s dead flat, by the two spumes of glass-like bow waves that spray outwards from the nose – it’s kind of hypnotic when combined with the perfect, rhythmical timing of the paddle strokes.”
At the London trials, Loccy had to negotiate a heat, semi and finals race format. He was up against far more experienced campaigners, but the progression of his performances through to the final hit out point to a savviness that will hold him in good stead for future campaigns.
He completed his heat in a comfortable 3:52.21 seconds, progressing to the semi‑final behind standout performer Murray Stewart. In his semi, he stepped it up, winning the first of them in 3:46.37 to book a centre lane for the final. The pressure was on; the dream of making an Olympic team at his first attempt at the race a distinct possibility.
Loccy unleashed a 3:38.37 final, coming in fifth behind Murray Stewart and Ken Wallace. An almost perfect series of races that were simply not fast enough to overcome the experience of the two qualifiers.
In the K1 200 metre race later in the program, he progressed to the final as the fastest qualifier in 36.84 seconds. Unfortunately his race progression wasn’t as well timed as his K1 1000 metre progression and he ended up paddling a fraction slower, coming in seventh at 37.48 seconds in a typical blanket finish. A slight improvement on his semi-final time would have seen him finish second or even win it.
Loccy’s not too fussed. He still had a superb season, winning the Australian surf ski paddle championship for Avoca.
“It’s made me see the possibilities of Rio in four more years,” he says. “It’s a real struggle getting up in the mornings to do the work, I’m really my own biggest obstacle, but I did alright this time, so with a bit more training and skill, some more flat-water racing, I’m in with a decent shot.
“I know what I’m in for at least, and the challenge of it is pretty exciting
