European Junior Championship.

Its been a week since I got back home from the Europeans. After my awesome comeback last year in the doubles winning 7 heats in a row and putting myself on the 2nd place so this year I really wanted to go for the gold.
The wind forecast wasn't looking good at all until the day before the competition, they were expecting 20-25kts offshore. In the morning the conditions showed up pretty bad with offshore strong and gusty wind for 7's and 5m. They started with the youngest category so that gave me the chance to see how the wind was and which was the spot with better gusts. The conditions were pretty challenging during the whole day, even the wind dropped during 1h at midday.

I decided to go for a warmup session near to the competition zone to make sure all my gear was perfectly set up. My first heat was up against Guy Bridge from the UK and Verges from France. The conditions were still gusty but not as strong as in the morning and after seeing everybody going downwind during the heats because of the offshore wind I decided to take a big kite and make sure I was going to stay upwind. The heat went pretty good for me nailed all my tricks and managed to make it straight into the third round.

In the third round I was up against my good friend Iñaki Gainza, I knew what tricks he could perform so that gave me confidence to have a great heat. I started the heat with my best 315 ever so that helped me a lot to go bigger in all my tricks to go through the finals.
Everything was working pretty good, I was on fire stomping all my tricks in each heat even thought the conditions weren't the best. The other two finalists were Denis Zurik from Poland and Guy Bridge from the UK.

The conditions were still super challenging the wind was so gusty and that make the kite choose even more tough. I spend half an hour to choose my kite size for the final holding the 13m at the beach, sometimes the wind was not enough and sometimes to much. In the end I decided to go with 13m.
We started the final with almost no wind and that make us lost a lot of time trying to find the gust, mid through the heat the wind picked up supper strong I was really overpowered on the 13m luckily I could land some tricks like KGB, Front blind mobe, S mobe5... The other guys were struggling with the conditions a little bit and I think this is what made the difference to make me win.

Im so happy and stoked now and even more motivated to train and go big in the next events!

Cheers,
Noè.

pics by: Reinout Simt - Watersports Pics. All rights reserved.