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13.9.2026
The final round at the historic Parc Olímpic del Segre once again demonstrated the depth of European Canoe Slalom and Kayak Cross. European athletes completed five clean podium sweeps across the eight events, while only Australia, Brazil and New Zealand managed to break into the medals.
The European influence extended far beyond one weekend. When the final series classifications were confirmed, seven of the eight 2026 World Cup overall titles belonged to European athletes, and European paddlers occupied 22 of the 24 places across the eight overall top threes.
It was a fitting end to a season in which Europe has consistently set the standard on the international stage.
La Seu brought together 249 athletes from 46 countries and five continents for the fifth and final World Cup of the season. In the six K1, C1 and Kayak Cross Individual start lists analysed by Paddle Europe before the competition, 170 of 247 unique athletes were European – almost 69 per cent of the field.
Clarke and Delassus open the Final with European sweeps
The European dominance was visible from the first medals of the week.
Great Britain's Joseph Clarke continued his exceptional Kayak Cross Individual season by winning the Men's event in 45.91 seconds.
Spain's Manuel Ochoa delighted the home crowd with silver, finishing only 0.52 seconds behind, while Czechia's Matyas Novak completed the entirely European podium in third. Felix Oschmautz, Pau Echaniz and Sam Leaver followed to make it six Europeans inside the first seven positions.
For Clarke, the result carried even greater significance. After winning both Kayak Cross disciplines one week earlier in Vaires-sur-Marne, victory in La Seu secured the 2026 Kayak Cross Individual overall World Cup title with 315 points. Fellow Briton Sam Leaver finished second overall and Ochoa third, giving Europe another complete season podium.
The Women's Individual competition delivered exactly the same continental outcome.
France's Marjorie Delassus produced the fastest run of the day in 50.24, beating reigning C1 World Champion Tereza Kneblova (CZE) by 0.52 seconds. Another French athlete, Angele Hug, took bronze, only 1.36 seconds behind the winner. Klaudia Zwolinska, Alena Marx and Lois Leaver completed an all-European top six.
Delassus' victory completed an impressive return after missing the entire 2025 season following knee surgery. It also gave her the overall World Cup title, with Kneblova second and Hug third – another complete European sweep of the season standings.
Castryck wins in La Seu as Italy takes control of the Men's K1 series
Friday brought another all-European podium in Men's K1.
France's Titouan Castryck ended his World Cup season with victory, producing a clean 81.80-second run.
Italy occupied the other two podium positions. Xabier Ferrazzi finished second, 0.99 seconds behind Castryck, while Paris 2024 Olympic champion Giovanni De Gennaro took bronze.
World Champion Jakub Krejci was fourth and Miquel Travé fifth, meaning the first seven positions all belonged to European paddlers.
Ferrazzi's silver was enough to secure one of the biggest achievements of his senior career: the 2026 Men's K1 overall World Cup title.
He finished the series with 302 points, ahead of De Gennaro on 282 and Krejci on 264. Three different nations – Italy, Italy and Czechia – but a completely European overall podium.
For De Gennaro, the result also completed an excellent final two World Cups. The Italian followed his victory in Vaires-sur-Marne with bronze in La Seu, while Castryck improved from silver in France to gold in Spain.
Fox wins again, but Prigent and Doria keep Europe on the podium
Women's K1 was one of only two events in La Seu not won by a European athlete.
Australia's Jessica Fox continued her outstanding season with victory in 93.77, including a two-second penalty.
France's Camille Prigent was only 0.72 seconds behind and took silver, while Monica Doria of Andorra secured bronze in 96.44. Maialen Chourraut, Sona Stanovska, Kimberley Woods, Laia Sorribes and Alena Marx were also among the European athletes inside the top ten.
Fox's victory secured the overall K1 World Cup crown, but Europe again occupied the other two places in the series top three.
Prigent finished second overall with 266 points, while Spain's Maialen Chourraut completed the season podium in third.
Travé gives the home crowd another world-class performance
Saturday provided one of the moments of the weekend for the Spanish supporters.
Reigning World and European Champion Miquel Travé won Men's C1 on home water with a clean 89.08-second run.
Slovenia's Ziga Lin Hocevar was actually faster on the water, stopping the clock at 87.43, but a two-second penalty left him only 0.35 seconds behind Travé.
Olympic champion Nicolas Gestin (FRA) took bronze to complete another entirely European podium, with Lukas Rohan, Adam Burgess, Liam Jegou, Dominik Egyhazy and several other European athletes filling most of the final.
Travé's victory continued an extraordinary sequence since the summer. The Spaniard became World Champion in Oklahoma City, finished fourth in Vaires and then returned to La Seu – the city where he was born – to win the final World Cup of 2026.
But second place was enough for Hocevar to secure the Men's C1 overall World Cup title with 311 points.
Gestin finished second in the final standings on 250, while Travé's victory lifted him to third on 239 – another European clean sweep of a World Cup series podium.
Hocevar family celebrates a unique double
The Men's C1 overall title was only half of an extraordinary weekend for the Hocevar family.
Earlier in the day, Eva Alina Hocevar had secured the Women's C1 overall World Cup crown despite missing the La Seu final.
Brazil's Ana Satila won the final in 103.85, but Europe immediately filled the next positions.
Spain's Miren Lazkano took silver, only 0.70 seconds behind the Brazilian, with reigning World Champion Tereza Kneblova (CZE) just nine hundredths further back in bronze.
Monica Doria finished fourth, only 0.24 seconds away from another medal, while Angele Hug and Mallory Franklin followed in fifth and sixth.
In the season standings, Eva Alina Hocevar held off Jessica Fox by just two points to become overall champion. Kneblova finished third on the same 232-point total as Fox.
The two Hocevar siblings therefore left La Seu as the Men's and Women's C1 overall World Cup champions on the same day, an exceptional achievement for Slovenian canoe slalom.
Monica Doria: representing athletes and performing among the world's best
Among the European stories to emerge from La Seu, Monica Doria's weekend deserves particular attention.
The Andorran finished the World Cup Final with two bronze medals in two different disciplines.
Her first came in Women's K1, where she joined Jessica Fox and Camille Prigent on the podium. After the race, Doria described achieving the result so close to home as particularly meaningful:
“To get a medal at home is always super special.”
The K1 bronze was already her third third-place World Cup finish of the 2026 season, and came only weeks after she won Women's C1 silver at the World Championships in Oklahoma City.
The following day she came within 0.24 seconds of adding a C1 medal, finishing fourth behind Satila, Lazkano and Kneblova. Then, on Sunday, she returned to the podium in the completely different environment of head-to-head Kayak Cross.
Doria finished third behind Kimberley Woods and Tereza Kneblova, earning her second medal of the La Seu World Cup Final.
Her 2026 international season therefore already includes World Championship silver and multiple World Cup podiums, while she is also the reigning European Women's C1 champion following her victory in Vaires-sur-Marne in 2025.
But Doria's role within European paddlesport extends beyond her own results.
She is Chair of the Paddle Europe Athletes Committee and the athlete representative on the Paddle Europe Board, becoming the first athlete to serve on the organisation's Board in that capacity. Paddle Europe Board records specifically recognise her role in strengthening the direct representation of athletes within European governance.
Combining elite international competition with a formal responsibility to represent the athletes themselves makes Doria a particularly relevant example of what athlete involvement can mean within Paddle Europe – competing at the highest level while also helping shape the environment in which European athletes compete.
And her next target is already clear: defending her European C1 title in Ivrea.
Ochoa completes his home weekend with Kayak Cross gold
The final day brought the World Cup season to a close with head-to-head Kayak Cross.
For Spain's Manuel Ochoa, it provided the perfect response to his narrow Individual defeat three days earlier.
After finishing 0.52 seconds behind Clarke in the Individual competition, Ochoa returned on Sunday to win the Men's Kayak Cross final.
Olympic champion Finn Butcher (NZL) took silver, while Switzerland's Jan Rohrer secured bronze ahead of Italy's Giovanni De Gennaro.
Europe therefore collected two of the three medals, but the bigger season prize went to Rohrer.
The Swiss paddler's bronze lifted him to the 2026 Men's Kayak Cross overall World Cup title with 224 points. Clarke finished second and De Gennaro third, giving Europe all three positions in the overall classification.
Woods wins the final race, Prigent takes the overall crown
The final women's race of the World Cup season produced one more complete European podium.
Great Britain's Kimberley Woods overcame a difficult day – including being struck in the face by a paddle during the quarterfinals – to win the Women's Kayak Cross final.
Reigning C1 World Champion Tereza Kneblova took silver for Czechia and Monica Doria secured bronze for Andorra, with Camille Prigent (FRA) fourth.
Prigent may have missed the medals in La Seu, but fourth place was enough to secure the Women's Kayak Cross overall World Cup title with 233 points.
Woods and Germany's Ricarda Funk finished jointly second on 230, producing another exclusively European overall podium.
For Prigent, the season title adds another major result before she heads to Ivrea as the defending European champion in both Women's Kayak Cross formats.
Seven of eight World Cup overall titles for Europe
The final series classifications provide perhaps the clearest measure of Europe's influence on Canoe Slalom and Kayak Cross during the 2026 World Cup season.
European athletes won seven of the eight overall World Cup titles:
Jessica Fox's Women's K1 title was the only overall crown to leave Europe.
The dominance is even more visible further down the standings. Twenty-two of the 24 athletes occupying the top three places across the eight final World Cup classifications were European.
Men's K1, Men's C1, both Kayak Cross Individual categories and both head-to-head Kayak Cross categories all ended with completely European overall podiums. Even in Women's K1 and Women's C1, Europe occupied two of the three leading positions.
21 of 24 medals in La Seu complete another European weekend
The statistics from La Seu itself tell a similarly powerful story.
Across eight individual events, European athletes won 21 of the 24 medals – 87.5 per cent of the entire podium allocation.
They claimed six of the eight gold medals, or 75 per cent of the victories, and produced five complete podium sweeps.
France led the European medal count with five medals, including victories for Castryck and Delassus. Spain collected four, with gold medals for Travé and Ochoa. Czechia also won four medals, while Great Britain took two golds through Clarke and Woods.
Italy and Andorra each collected two medals, with Slovenia and Switzerland also reaching the podium.
The only three non-European medals were Jessica Fox's Women's K1 gold for Australia, Ana Satila's Women's C1 gold for Brazil and Finn Butcher's Men's Kayak Cross silver for New Zealand.
Those numbers continue a remarkable sequence.
At the World Championships in Oklahoma City, Europe collected 20 of the 24 individual medals and six of the eight titles. One week before La Seu, European paddlers won 23 of 24 medals and seven of eight titles in Vaires-sur-Marne.
Across those three major competitions alone – Oklahoma City, Vaires-sur-Marne and La Seu – Europe won 64 of the 72 individual medals available, or 88.9 per cent, together with 19 of the 24 titles.
Few statistics illustrate more clearly the current position of European nations within world Canoe Slalom and Kayak Cross.
World Cup over – now all roads lead to Ivrea
The 2026 World Cup is now complete.
Five rounds – Tacen, Prague, Augsburg, Vaires-sur-Marne and La Seu d’Urgell – have produced eight overall champions and another season of exceptionally close international racing.
For Europe's leading athletes, however, the major 2026 season is not finished yet.
The attention now shifts to Ivrea, Italy, where the 2026 Paddle Europe Canoe Slalom Championships will take place from 23 to 27 September.
Several athletes will arrive carrying extraordinary momentum.
Travé goes to Italy as the reigning World and European C1 champion after winning the World Cup Final. Doria will defend her European C1 crown after two La Seu medals and a World Championship silver. Prigent travels as the defending European champion in both Women's Kayak Cross disciplines and the newly crowned overall World Cup champion in head-to-head Kayak Cross.
World Champion Jakub Krejci will defend his European Kayak Cross title, while Gabriel De Coster returns as Men's Kayak Cross Individual European champion. Ricarda Funk and Jiri Prskavec remain the defending European K1 champions.
But La Seu has also added Castryck, Ferrazzi, De Gennaro, the Hocevar siblings, Clarke, Delassus, Woods, Ochoa, Kneblova, Lazkano and many others to an already formidable list of athletes arriving in form.
The World Cup season has delivered one message with remarkable consistency: European Canoe Slalom is not being driven by one nation or one generation, but by an extraordinary depth of athletes across the continent.
La Seu brought the global World Cup season to an end. In ten days, Europe will race for its own crowns in Ivrea.
© 2021 ECA
