A black wool hat is on his head, his shoulder-length, dark brown hair is sticking out from under it when Noah Hegge arrives at the ice channel on his bike in the morning. Headgear is his trademark, even in summer temperatures, and if you didn’t know better, he’d live up to the stereotype of a skater. But the 23-year-old is a slalom canoeist – and successfully so. On the first day of the Canoe Slalom World Championships, the man from Augsburg won gold on the home course, in the kayak team together with Stefan Hengst and Hannes Aigner. “The fact that we, as three individual athletes, can pull ourselves together and each of us scale back his ego shows a lot of greatness,” Hegge analyzed immediately afterwards. Only 16 hours after the opening of the title fights on the Augsburg town hall square, a German shower of medals is announced.
“A world championship title here at home in Augsburg means a lot to me,” says Hegge, he is reserved, celebrating the title with his brothers who have come to the ice track. At the age of 23 he has arrived at the top of the world and can now include his first medal at world championships in his CV.
The Hegge family discovered canoeing when the World Championships were last held in Augsburg
19 years ago, when the World Championships last took place in Augsburg, the Hegge family found out about the sport, he says, and his eldest brother finally took him to training. Since then he has pushed his career in the canoe: youth training, “after school I met friends to paddle”, then he became a youth trainer at the canoe Swabians in Augsburg. He also helped out at the World Cups in Fuggerstadt and cheered on the Germans. Now Hegge himself is the local favourite.
Four years ago he was still in an Augsburg pastry shop, for an apprenticeship. Hegge looks back fondly on the time “achieving something together, being a team and seeing results – I enjoyed that”. And yet he is happy to be able to concentrate fully on canoeing, he is now also part of the sports promotion of the Bundeswehr.
Now, during the conversation on the terrace of the Eiskanal, he looks devoutly at the track below him, in the midst of the fans. Already on the first day of the competition, Wednesday morning, large numbers of people flocked to the Augsburg ice track, international guests, school classes and local onlookers. And they get to see a German gold prelude.
It was “the best team run I’ve ever done,” says Olympic champion Ricarda Funk
Because even before Hegge and his colleagues, it was the kayak women’s turn with Olympic champion Ricarda Funk and Elena Lilik. “The pressure was immense,” said Funk, and yet the competitions were less than ten minutes old when the Germans’ first target time was already set. It was “the best team run I’ve ever ridden,” said Funk. Together with Jasmin Schornberg, the 36-year-old old champion, she was still trembling, eleven teams still had the ice track ahead of them. But then, with a loud outcry, the certainty followed: first race, first gold.
Only Elena Lilik could not quite join the hustle and bustle of joy, for her the rest of the day was: regenerate and concentrate again. Because for Lilik, the German all-rounder, there was another team competition on the program: this time in the canoe. The Germans were also on their way to gold in the kneeling paddle variant before the Czechs were deducted the supposed penalty seconds, leaving the German trio with silver. Still, Lilik was satisfied with the interim result of a gold and a silver medal: “Today was a really good day.” She would have flirted with the medals, but now she hopes “that I can continue to do this for the next few days”.
Four team competitions, three German medals
Only the Canadian men around Sideris Tasiadis had to settle for fourth place without a medal. The home track, which appeared to be an easy route on Wednesday, once again showed its pitfalls. A good two seconds were missing on the podium and the completion of the medal quartet.
In return, the others were allowed to celebrate at noon at the award ceremony in the Olympic Park, Elena Lilik twice, Noah Hegge once. Before that, however, he still had to take fan pictures along the route. “Encouraging children to do sport” is the goal, says Hegge. And yet he still has sporting ambitions for the coming days: “The individual competition is a bit more important,” says the 23-year-old, the anticipation can be seen in his eyes. At the weekend, the finals will increase in the individual rankings, Hegge finished sixth in his World Championship debut last year.
“A lot can happen in a final, you don’t have everything in your own hands,” he looks ahead, on his possible kayak final Saturday even more fans from his family and circle of friends would come to the ice channel. “But that shouldn’t really interest me anyway,” he says and smiles.