Greetings everybody.
It has been a quiet six weeks for me as I have been recovering from shoulder surgery. I am hopeful that this second surgery after my accident last year will finally get me back to being able to paddle as I have really missed it this last season.
It has been fantastic watching all the racing going on in the northern hemisphere particularly the inaugural CanAm championships held in Welland, Canada in which several of our breast cancer teams were competing. Brilliant to see Rowbust in fine form flying the BCP flag.
We have been busy at IBCPC over the last few months with creating a new website. Digital commerce changes so rapidly that we thought even though we had only created the website in 2019 it was time to update it. The old one has now been fully transferred and is fully functioning. We have done an edit of the website which should be completed in the next week or two and hopefully we have covered off everything, please do feel free to tell us if there is anything that does not look right.
We have been working on the structure of IBCPC and moving forward, particularly regarding regional coordinators. We are watching the growth that we have been experiencing over the last few months which has made us rethink how that structure looks. We are now sitting at 380 teams across 40 countries, this is phenomenal growth in the last few years.
This growth flows through teams wanting to be competitive where we now have the biggest representation that we have ever seen at the IDBF Club Crew World Championships (CCWC) with nine standard boat teams and sixteen small boat teams from ten countries. We wish them all incredibly well and no doubt we will hear more about that in the next newsletter. It is exciting to report that we have a new country joining us and they will be represented at the CCWC, the team is the Beodragons from Belgrade Serbia.
The biggest news and the biggest surprise to all of us were the rapid number of registrations for France 2026 and how quickly they came in and how quickly the site was to its full capacity of 4500. 140 full teams have registered, 29 incomplete teams registered, The equivalent of 28 teams of supporters. You can read further in this newsletter a breakdown of the countries and the numbers attending. The organisers will be issuing an updated newsletter when they return after mid-August from taking breast cancer survivors for a journey up the Loire River.
The biggest growth for our organisation comes from taking outreach clinics and we will be going to Croatia to combine with Serbia in the last weekend of August. We will be ably assisted by some of our national representatives from Europe and paddlers from some of the European member teams. We will report further on this in the next newsletter.
It was so thrilling to see two breast cancer teams participating in carrying the Olympic flame again you can read further about this in the newsletter but we have managed to share it all over our Facebook page. We are so super proud of those incredible women who conveyed the torch towards Paris.
Enjoy the rest of the summer those of you who are still competing in the northern hemisphere and we look forward to what the rest of the year unfolds.
Paddles up !!
Best regards
Meri
