Organising and timing a whitewater downriver races as simple as it gets when using RaceGorilla. Two volunteers can time the complete race : one at the start  and one at the finish. Just install the app, enter the names in the start list and start the race.

Characteristics of Canoe Wildwater

In canoe whitewater sprint, the start and finish are typically a few hundred meters apart whereas in the classic distance, the race is a couple of kilometres long. Often a great deal of the canoe downriver course is not in direct view for the spectators which makes it hard to follow the race progress. In such case it’s good to provide a couple of split times. These live updates add a lot to the race experience of the public and the competitors.
Canoe wildwater races have individual starts at about 60 seconds interval. However, sometimes mass starts or group starts are held. There are three boat types: K1 (individual kajak), C1 (individual canoe) and C2 (double canoe). Both men and women paddle in wildwater downriver races. CIW (Canoe Single Women) gets more and more popular every year.

During the classic distance races, there are multiple paddlers on course. Fast athletes will overtake slower paddlers during the race and close finish situations may occur. The finisher solves these situations without a problem by selecting the approaching athlete before they finish. When the finisher makes a mistake, swapping a finish times in the app is easy, therefore, the perfect results are on the internet in a matter of seconds.

Accuracy

Times are displayed in 1/100 of a second and mostly timed using photocells. RaceGorilla is designed to make timing as easy as possible, so photocells are not needed. Hand timing will be accurate enough for small to mid-size canoe slalom races. (see this blog). It is possible to use times from third party devices such as finish camera or photocells. The RaceGorilla BlueBox sends times from an Alge Timy or Tag Heuer device directly to the smartphone. To know more about the accuracy, have a look at our Blog about this subject.

Race management dashboard

RaceGorilla offers an online dashboard for the race management to check all scores and to handle protests and inquiries. On the online race management dashboard you can lookup times and rankings as well as print out the official results.
To keep the race organisation simple, just use one smartphone at the start and one at the finish. If there are enough volunteers and devices, it to take some extra split times.

Time trial or mass start formats for Downriver

Most downriver races, use the time trial format. In a time trial each competitor can be started individually, in pairs or in small groups.
A simple race only has a start and a finish. To give more insights of the race to the supporters, just add a number of split points.
For a quick test just use the standard format available in RaceGorilla.
The simple default race for a downriver event has a start and a finish, and a category of men and women. If you want to set up a race with more splits or more categories, use the RaceGorilla dashboard to set up a race entirely to you demands.

Try it yourself!

Just download the app and experience how easy it is!
If you do find it hard to get going, you can read our Quick Start Guide.

If you have any questions, please send us a message.

Do you want to check what the results can look like? Here is an example of the Downriver Race in Venlo in The Netherlands