Paddlecast

Sebastian Szubski has passed the halfway mark on his circumnavigation of Britain, and he’s neck and neck with Dougal Glaisher’s 2023 record of 40 days. He’s ticking off the kilometres like he eats them for breakfast. For any day where he faces a slowdown due to weather, he makes up for it with two 100km+ days. 12-14 hour days in the boat are standard fare for Sebastian these days, with his longest...

Last weekend, new European champions were crowned at the Sprint Canoe & Paracanoe European Championships in Racice. Conditions were hot and flat, and many paddlers were rewarded with new European Best Times. Some results were to be expected (Dorota Borowska of Poland successfully defended her C1 200m title from 2024; Gabriele Casadei / Carlo Tacchini of Italy won the men’s C2 500m; Anna Pulaws...

Paolo Marconi is one of the “original” stand up paddleboard racers. The first year he raced internationally, 2011, was the year that SUP Racer was founded. That’s fourteen years of top level SUP racing. So when it comes to talking about what it means to be a stand up paddleboard racer, there’s not many who can compete with Paolo. But in “Racing the Quit Monkey”, Paolo shares a journey that has bee...

This week’s news starts with an update on how Sebastian Szubski is doing 5 days into his attempt to break the record for fastest circumnavigation of Britain by kayak. As Betsy and Billy were recording, Sebastian was out on the water for a 105 kilometre crossing of the Moray Firth from Wick to Fraserburgh. Not only does this crossing give him a huge boost in time and distance on the circumnavigatio...

Starting with last week and weekend’s European Marathon Canoe Championships in Ponte de Lima, Portugal, Billy and Betsy review the best of the racing. They answer the questions: → Which races were the most competitive? → Which races were the best to watch? → Who out-performed their expectations? → Which athletes should you be watching for podium potential going into the World Games and World Champ...

This weekend is stacked with two European paddling championships: Marathon Canoe Racing in Ponte de Lima Portugal, and Wildwater Canoe Racing in Mazzana Italy. So there’s a lot to talk about. The level of competition at the European marathon champs will rival that of the upcoming World Games later this year, and will feature some of the biggest names and rivalries in the sport. Several of the podi...

The attendance may have been low at this year’s surfski Molokai (Kaiwi Channel Crossing), but the speeds were high. Danielle Mackenzie Richards of New Zealand broke the women’s record, and local paddler Pat Dolan fought an incredibly close race with four-time Molokai winner Cory Hill (AUS) to break the men’s race record. At the Canoe Sprint World Cup in Poznan, several athletes who’ve previously f...

Kira Bester is on fire. After winning the Surfski World Championships in Madeira in 2024, she’s gone on to win every major race of 2025 so far: South African national championships, Freedom Paddle, and Eurochallenge. And she’s only 23. On Paddlecast, Kira shares exactly what it’s like to train at a world champion level, her current goals (including a potential Olympic campaign!), which of her padd...

Sprint paddling content creator and influencer Philip Bryde joins Paddlecast to talk about his viral video calling out the ICF for paywalling their live streams. Last weekend, paddling fans from around the world searched for how to watch the first Sprint Canoe World Cup of the year live and found that they’d have to pay £9.99 for a channel membership on YouTube. This has been a hot issue in the pa...

In the northern hemisphere, spring is starting to turn into summer, and the racing is really heating up now! Billy and Betsy start with a SUP racing recap from the World SUP Festival Costa Blanca in Santa Pola last weekend. Shuri “Shrimpy” Araki from Japan smashed through an incredibly strong men’s field yet again to win both the distance and technical races. After dominating early races where som...

Catching up on news, today’s episode is shorter but jam-packed with news from marathon kayaking/canoe and stand up paddleboard racing. Billy and Betsy start with the Dordogne Integrale, one of the biggest ultra paddling races of the year where the first two K1 finishers were separated by only 1 second after more than 8 hours of paddling. They take a quick look at the GB marathon selection race res...

Billy and Betsy recap the last few major surfski races and share their live interviews from the ocean racing Exe Bay event in Exmouth, UK. Billy shares a race report on South African Surfski Nationals (solo) including the conditions and strategies in play. It wasn’t the classic downwind, Miller’s Run, that racers dreamt of. Instead fog on the water led to a change in course and perhaps an advantag...

To wrap up Paddlecast’s coverage of the 125 mile ultra paddling Devizes to Westminster race which was the most competitive year in recent memory, Billy and Betsy sit down with each of the crews who made the podium in the senior doubles race. Each crew shares the highs and lows of their race with surprisingly honest answers. As close as Billy and Betsy were to the race (Billy was racing and Betsy l...

It was the most competitive DW in recent memory. At the first checkpoint, the first eight crews were within 8 minutes of each other. As the race wore on, half of those crews dropped off or dropped out. But the four crews remained within the same 8 minute gap. At Teddington, the top three had earned separation, but their order had completely flipped. The gap across all three was only two and half m...

Longtime SUP racer Emily King joins Paddlecast to talk about why she's signed up to be one of the first stand up paddleboarders to race the Devizes to Westminster this weekend. In its more than seven decades of history, 2025 is the first year the DW has allowed SUPs to race. Emily, along with Paddy McCormack, will be one of the "SUP Pioneers". She'll paddle nearly 125 miles from...

It’s here. We couldn’t wait until Monday to drop this one: the Paddlecast Preview of Devizes to Westminster 2025. DW is England’s most iconic race that runs every Easter Weekend and finishes in central London in front of Parliament. 125 miles, 77 portages, from Saturday starts all the way through the night until Sunday morning. If you’ve been following Paddle Daily’s coverage of the Waterside and...

Paddlecast may be on a bi-weekly schedule, but with a plethora of paddling news from around the world, a fresh episode was a must. Billy and Betsy cover recent and upcoming races from their unique features (“the washing machine” and possibly the smoothest portage in Europe) to top contenders for national championships and World Games to the new European SUP League that starts in just a few weeks....

Welcome to the new Paddlecast, hosted by Betsy and Billy.

In the first episode of Paddlecast since 2020 , new co-hosts Betsy and Billy introduce themselves and share paddling news from around the world. The new Paddlecast will continue to cover stand up paddleboard racing as part of the core mission of SUP Racer, but will also cover canoe and kayak racing including marathon canoe and surfski. Betsy and Billy have a Venn diagram of paddling enthusiasms th...

Nadia & Nico Schenk are traveling all the way around the coast of Australia in their motorhome, and just to make a little more interesting, Nico is paddling/running/riding the entire way. Yes, all 16,000km of it (that's 10,000 miles...). Follow @australia.epic.lap on Instagram for more

Jim Terrell is a four-time Olympian and the founder of Quickblade Paddles. We had a great chat about everything from building canoes to competing in the Olympics, the birth of QB and working with guys like Dave Kalama and Laird Hamilton in the earliest days of the sport. We were also joined by Jimmy's good friend and one of the original SoCal paddlers, Dane DeBoer, to chat about the first-ever Bat...

Andrey Kraytor is an Olympic athlete who competed in sprint canoe at the 2016 Games and now coaches the Chinese national team. He's also a total bad-ass on a SUP, almost winning the gold medal against Connor Baxter at the ICF Worlds last year. We had a great chat about the realities of becoming an Olympic athlete (the good, the bad and the ugly) plus the cross-over between canoeing and stand up pa...

Dave Kalama talks foiling, philosophy and the zen of the ocean. It's always a pleasure to catch up with the innovative, insightful and very entertaining master of the sea. Follow @davekalama on Insta

Tamas (or just "Tommy") Buday Jr. is a three-time Olympian from Canada via Hungary. We had a great chat today about the Olympics, canoe racing and his first memories of pretending to paddle in the bathtub ### If you're enjoying these "quarantine editions" of Paddlecast then I invite you to join 'Club SUP Racer' on Patreon, which supports the creative work I do including these daily podcasts. There...

I'm inviting you to join "Club SUP Racer" to help fund the creative work I do and ensure these daily podcasts keep on rolling. If you're interested in supporting SUP Racer, head to supracer.com/club for all the details...