BLUE EWER RACING UPDATE

Blue Ewer reflects on his SUP racing performance midway through his race season, after finishing 5th overall on the Euro Tour and looks ahead to the World Championships later in the year.

- BLUE EWER

For 2024 the international SUP season has been split into two parts with the EuroTour and other big European SUP races almost all being held in May and June, followed by a lengthy break before the ISA Worlds in Copenhagen, Denmark, in September and the ICF Worlds in Sarasota, Florida, in November. The first part of the season was all condensed into two months, meaning that we saw a lot of the world’s best racers coming to Europe for the whole of May, which made the EuroTour tougher than ever while giving it a feeling of being more like a world tour.  After a busy winter away training, I was feeling good for this season and was looking forward to racing against all of the world’s best again. May consisted of my biggest events of the year so far, which started with a big EuroTour race in Sicily, Italy, where we had a truly international field with a lot of the best paddlers in the world joining from Europe, South America, Japan, Australia and New Caledonia.

Race 1 - EuroTour Mondello (Italy)

The first big race of the 2024 season was in Sicily, Italy, in the town of Mondello. A few days before the race I took a flight from London to Palermo where I happened to be on the same flight as multiple-times world champion and good friend, Michael Booth. After a good catch up with Michael we arrived in Palermo late on Thursday evening and took a short, but scary taxi to Mondello where our driver lived up to the Italian’s reputation of being crazy behind the wheel. When race day arrived on Saturday morning, we had windy conditions with an upwind, downwind course for most of the race with some small bumps. Everything started strongly with a high pace being set by four-time world champion, Shuri “Shrimpy" Araki, as we came into the downwind section on the first of two laps. After a hard push I worked myself into third position, just behind Shrimpy and Vaïc Garioud.