If you’re a Brexit voting, Tory supporting whitewater kayaker, please turn away now, because your ‘woke’ meter will go off the scale and you’ll explode. Sorry not sorry. Consider yourself warned.
Recently there’s been some discussion in social media circles about the price to paddle at Canolfan Tryweryn, a dam release river in North Wales. Now, I’m not going to go into the arguments for and against or the reasons behind the charges, but I am going to focus on the idea that it’s a barrier to entry to the sport, as well as kayaking’s diversity problem. It’s something that’s bugged me for quite a few years now.
The cost of entry
Now, aside from the fact that Tryweryn isn’t the only option for beginners during the summer, it is as well to talk about white water kayaking as a whole. Thankfully the kayaking community is generally a very accepting, friendly and tolerant one. But, it still faces two problems. Firstly, the cost of entry into the sport/pastime can be high if you want to actually own the gear. In some ways it is similar to mountain biking in that regard. Boats don’t cost as much as a top of the range mountain bike, but you can get a very well specced hardtail bike for the same price as a new plastic kayak these days. Even used boat prices have soared due to the rise in price of new ones.
On top of that, if you want to be comfortable you’ll need decent kit. Sure, you can purchase leaky secondhand gear, but that’s not exactly wonderful in winter. To be truly comfortable you need a dry jacket at the very least, and some good thermals. You could still be looking at going on £300-£500 to get this kit new. Again, you can find some bargains on the used market, and occasionally some good quality stuff comes up, but kayakers most often sell stuff when it’s knackered. The only pristine stuff generally gets sold if someone is retiring from the sport due to injury, or they started it and then found out it wasn’t for them.
Then there’s the cost of travel. Kayaking involves lots of travelling unless you live close by to a decent river. It staggers me how often some people drive long distances on a regular basis, and what it must cost in fuel. But they can afford it. Lots of can’t.
But while there are ways around the cost of entry barrier, such as joining a club and using their kit, there’s a much bigger problem with the sport.
Diversity, or lack of it
Thankfully, kayaking has a decent number of kick ass women in the sport. Athletes like Nouria Newman constantly push the boundaries of what is possible, not just in terms of her gender, but the sport as a whole. Although the situation could still do with improvement. While there are a number of high profile kayakers who identify as female, there still aren’t the numbers compared with the men. However, if we look at the kayaking community as a whole, let alone just the UK, have you ever stopped to think about the variety in skin colour? I know I have. When I go to the average busy day at Tryweryn, or CIWW, or HPP, I see a sea of white. Only extremely rarely do I see someone from an ethnically diverse background in a whitewater kayak. Even if I include the world championship freestyle competitions I think representatives from Japan were the only non-white competitors I saw! I am happy to be corrected on that, but even if I’m wrong, the field of competitors was indisputably 99% white.
I do not know the circumstances behind the situation in Uganda, but it would have been nice to see a similar rally around supporting a Ugandan team taking part in the World’s as there was in one previous year in Canada. With the White Nile having another important section of white water dammed off in the past few years, it sometimes feels as though the Ugandan freestyle community has been forgotten, despite the continuing efforts to keep the fire alive by the Bubugo Banana Kayak School.
Competing to a high level in freestyle often means devoting your life to it. There are exceptions to this of course, so don’t @ me, but if we’re being honest, how many people can afford to go abroad for several months at a time to train? This is no slight on those competitors who do that, but just an illustration of the divide of opportunity in the sport that there is.
I think we have to face up to the fact that unless a dedicated funding scheme is put in place to introduce and encourage the sport to a wider demographic, white water kayaking is most definitely a white middle-class sport. Yes, there are exceptions, however, don’t mistake the comparatively few people who buck the trend for being the general rule of thumb.
Certainly, I’m not the only person to have noticed the issue of diversity in the sport. There are communities such as People of Colour Paddle, that aim to promote and encourage the sport among a more diverse population. However, it’s a persistent issue with the sport that I don’t think is being looked at or acted upon as seriously as it should be.
The Kayaking Journal 
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