Tamas Mihalyi has qualified for Team Canada’s outrigger canoe team for the second year in a row. Next year he will represent the country at the Outrigger World Sprint Championships in Tahiti.
Mihalyi has been paddling for five years with the Gibsons Paddle Club. He moved to the Sunshine Coast in 2013 from Toronto, where he immigrated to 13 years earlier.
“My wife got me paddling – she was crazy about it,” he said.
Although his wife, Krisztina Harasztosi, introduced him to outrigger canoes, Mihalyi was already quite familiar with canoes, having been on the national canoeing team in his native Hungary as a young man.
“I was a young fellow then, doing Olympic canoeing. I was on the national team racing single and double boats, but I gave it up 30 years ago,” he said.
Five years ago Mihalyi started racing again, and both last year and this year he made the cut to represent Canada at the worlds.
At the recent Canadian championships in Calgary, Mihalyi qualified in the elite open in the men’s master category (40-49) and he qualified in the solo rudderless canoe, or va’a as it is traditionally called, in the master’s category.
The outrigger canoe or va’a originated in Hawaii; the boat is about 22 feet long and weighs about 25 pounds.
The va’a is raced long distance and in sprints, which is Mihalyi’s favourite. His specialty is the 500-metre sprint, but as a qualifier he can also compete in the 1,000 and 1,500-metre sprints – and he intends to do just that in Tahiti.
Because outrigger canoe paddling is not an Olympic sport, Mihalyi said there is not a lot of money in the sport, and so competitors must pay their own way to international events. Mihalyi’s wife is his personal coach and also an outrigger canoe racer (who won a spot on the Canadian team last year, but missed out this year). She has set up a GoFundme page for her husband to help raise money for his trip next July (www.gofundme.com/worldsprints2018). She will be updating the page with information about his training and his trip to the world sprints.
