Olivier and Koch survive to claim Olympic berth

Esti Olivier and Tiffany Koch overcame tricky conditions in a tense winner-takes-all shootout to claim the last places in the South African Olympic Canoeing team selected at the SA Championships at Victoria Lake in Germiston on Sunday.

The pair beat 2012 Olympic bronze medalist Bridgitte Hartley and former World Surfski Champion Michelle Burn in the final leg of the three-race shootout to earn the women's 500m K2 place in the team to go to Paris in August.

On Friday, Olivier and Koch narrowly won the women's 500m K2 SA Championships final, but Hartley and Burn were close enough to trigger the shootout selection series of two more races to finalise the women's boat for the 2024 Olympics.

Saturday's race saw Hartley and Burn level things up, but then on Sunday, in tricky side/headwind conditions, Olivier and Koch bounced back and comfortably did enough to win the selection series 2-1 and claim the Olympic place.

In Paris they will join men's K2 500m winners Andy Birkett and Hamish Lovemore, who won Friday's final by a big enough margin to avoid the tense shootout series.

For Olivier, it is reward for a tough year of chasing and narrowly missing an Olympic qualification place from World Cup events in Europe. She then won the African Championships 500m K2 final with Helen Jansen van Vuuren in Nigeria in November to secure South Africa a place in Paris.

For this weekend's SA Championships, which doubled as the Olympic Trials, Olivier and Koch resurrected a World Cup partnership from 2015/2016. Koch also competed in the 2012 London Olympics.

The pair were clear winners on Friday in the Championship 500m K2 final, but were then convincingly beaten by their rivals on Saturday in the second leg of the shootout, to set up the winner-takes-all showdown on Sunday.

Tough side/headwinds meant both boats battled for rhythm in the 500m dash for team selection, but Olivier and Koch were more settled through the middle portion of the race and had already done enough to secure the all-important victory when Koch missed a stroke near the finish line in the choppy conditions.

"I don't think it has all sunk in yet," said a clearly relieved Olivier after her event.

"It was definitely harder than I expected it to be. I did not expect Bridgitte and Michelle to push us as hard as they did. It was a serious mental game to get through three rounds with so much at stake. I think this was probably like the hardest weekend of racing ever for me ... international or local. It's been the most high-pressure weekend of racing I have ever experienced."

"Saturday was a bit of a bad race for us. It was just a bad day, but I think we both handled it well, and just removed ourselves from the situation and thought about it and put it behind us.

"Then we both rocked up this morning just frothing to race," added Olivier with a laugh.

"Tiff and I have done many races together. It is not like we are a new combination, but we are an old combination that is back together. We know each other well and we know how to deal with stress, so she's definitely the right person to share this moment with.

"We tried to qualify for the Rio games and we just missed qualification there and then Tiff stopped racing competitively ... until I phoned her.

"So GCU champs in January was our first race together in eight years, Friday was the second race, Saturday was the third and today was the fourth."

And one of their next races in the near future will be at the Paris Olympics in August.

The SA Championships finished on Sunday and squads for the Senior World Championships, World Cup events, the Junior and U23 World Championships, and the Olympic Hopes international development regatta will be announced shortly.