Ella’s on her way to the Olympics

Cook Islands slalom canoeist Ella Nicholas has qualified for the London 2012 Olympics and has had a great start to her Olympic build up finishing third at the New Zealand opens last weekend.

Held on the white water course at Mangahao near Palmerston North, New Zealand, this International Canoe Federation ranking race featured some of the worlds top ranked slalom athletes from 10 different nations.

Young Czech star Karolina Galuskova took the womens K1 honours, narrowly beating kiwi Olympian Luuka Jones.

The 17-year-old posted a time of 111.48 ahead of Jones by just 1.39 seconds.

Third place went to Ella Nicholas who has also qualified for an Olympic place for the Cook Islands.

After a solid semi final run that placed her in the top 10 final, Nicholas improved to put down a faster time with less penalties and posted a career best result, ahead of five paddlers of higher international ranking.

Im really happy with what I achieved at this race. Ive been having some help with my race preparation from a sports psychologist and so the mental aspect of my paddling was my main focus for this race, not the outcome. This ended up paying off with a medal which was an extra bonus.

Next on the agenda for the 21-year-old 4th year medical student, are six weeks of paddling in Australia.

During this stint there are another two ICF races the Australian Open (February 10-12) and the Oceania Championships (February 24-26) plus a large block of time on the white water.

I still have a lot of work to do in my Olympic build up. I am really excited to head to Australia this week to continue my training on the Sydney 2000 Olympic course. Im looking forward to getting into a good routine of hard white water training and hopefully have some more good results.

Nicholas, who is taking a year off her medical studies to paddle fulltime ahead of the London Olympics, is looking forward to some tough competition in Australia.

Many top international paddlers come to Australia during their winter for some off season training so the competition at these races is really tough. It is sometimes scary training amongst the best in the world but I learn so much just from watching them.

All three Nicholas siblings are medical students and slalom paddlers.

Juggling studies and training is proving difficult but they are keeping their paddles in the water until more time is on their side. Sister Jane finished 7th in K1 womens division at the weekends racing, meeting the qualifying standard for the New Zealand senior womens team and brother Bryden was 4th in the B final of the K1 mens division and 7th in the C1 mens race.

The latter is also racing for the Cook Islands and has an outside chance of earning an Olympic spot in the C1 mens division at the Oceania Continental championships later in February.