http://www.independent.ie/sport/other-s ... 38987.html
Irish Independent wrote:Canoeist Hannah Craig is aiming to beat the odds and qualify for the Olympics, writes Marie Crowe
When it comes to sports funding, some athletes are just lucky. They meet the criteria at exactly the right time, they consistently avoid injury, or someone who has power puts faith in them for an extended period for time.
Others are not so fortunate. They have a bad a season, they come good at the wrong time or are plagued by injury.
Since the Irish Sports Council released this year's funding allocations, the cases of several athletes have been played out in the media. We've seen, read and heard about boxers, cyclists and runners who -- depending on your view -- should or shouldn't have received funding.
In canoeing, Eoin Rheinisch was awarded podium funding of €40,000. This figure hasn't changed since he finished fourth at the 2008 Olympics. And while he has put that money to good use by competing on the international circuit and training in Australia, not all of his counterparts have been as fortunate.
Hannah Craig is one example. She narrowly missed out on Olympic qualification in 2008 and, like Rheinisch, has been competing on the international circuit for several years. But, unlike Rheinisch, Craig has had to survive for the most part without any funding even though she is widely held as one of the best slalom canoeists in Ireland.
Since Beijing, the Irish Canoe Union has received over €1m in core funding from the Irish Sports Council on top of their high-performance and direct athlete investment funding. Yet only for one year did Craig receive any of that from her union despite the fact that the ISC consider her to be an international standard athlete with Olympic potential. The Sunday Independent understands that Craig is now likely to receive funding direct from the ISC to assist in her bid to to qualify for London 2012.
For most of Hannah Craig's life she has been involved in canoeing. Her formative years were spent living on a sheep farm on the north coast of Ireland, close to the Giant's Causeway. And although she was beside the sea it wasn't there she developed her interest in water sports.
When she was nine, her parents decided to sell the family farm and move to France. The family travelled around for a few months before eventually settling in a house beside a river in the Charente region. It was there that Craig got her first taste of water sports. The French don't attend school on a Wednesday afternoon so Craig took up canoeing. She passively practised for a few years but it was when she went to boarding school at 15 that she started to get serious about the sport.
It was slalom that she took to. This is done in a canoe or kayak and the aim is to navigate through a course of hanging gates on river rapids as quickly as possible. Craig made a lot of progress in a short space of time and it wasn't long before she was chosen for a junior French team.
When Craig went to university in France she was set back a little after a few health problems. After a stint of travelling, she decided to move back to Ireland, switch her allegiance to her country of birth and commit to a career in the sport. She was 22 at that stage and the 2008 Olympics wasn't too far away, so Dublin became her base and qualifying for Beijing her focus.
When she arrived in Ireland first at the end of 2005, she began training in Leixlip. There was a coaching structure in place there for canoeists but over the next couple of years that collapsed. There was also funding available for Craig but that gradually petered out too and by Olympic year the focus was on the men's category, and Craig was left to her own devices. She narrowly missed out on qualification for the Games and although she was disappointed, there were other issues that were a cause for concern.
"There were difficulties with the Irish Canoe Union and difficulties with the system that was in place," explains Craig. Rheinisch became a household name in Beijing, only just edged out of a medal, but from where Craig sat alarm bells were already ringing. It appeared to her that the union lacked direction and the sport suffered. "By 2008, there were only five or six people left paddling slalom in Ireland."
After her Olympic disappointment Craig decided that she wanted to work within the canoe industry. She moved to Belfast with her partner Han Bijnen, who is a coach, and they put a development programme in place for kids who were interested in paddling. They set up coaching weekends and talent days, and kids travelled from around the country to participate. Sport Northern Ireland contributed towards the programme, which is called Beyond 2012, and eventually due to demand they expanded to Dublin with the support of the ICU's Slalom committee. In the last three years they have got kids to international level and Ireland is starting to be competitive again in slalom.
When Craig made the move to Belfast in 2008, she resumed her slalom training and started to make progress again. She integrated into the Sports Institute of Northern Ireland and benefited from the additional support that came with their involvement. She had access to sports psychologists, physiotherapists and nutritionists and she quickly improved.
"Having the professional support made a big difference to me, I didn't have it before," she says, arguing that a big failing in the ICU in her experience was that it supported individuals rather than results.
In 2009, she was given an athlete's contract, with the instructions that it had to be signed and sent back immediately. The contract stated that she would not get any funding; Craig was obviously uncomfortable with the request but she didn't have time to show it to a solicitor.
"At that time I was the only female athlete left and the one with the best chance for 2012 because with the men you can have only one boat per category so it made no sense from a development point of view," she says.
"It was a very disheartening situation and I know it affected every single athlete who was on the team at that time. For all the athletes it's a passion, you want to do well and you want to be supported not just in financial ways."
So Craig just got on with things, and in 2010 she had her best season, finishing 13th in the world and securing an eight-nation finish. The work she was doing with the Sports Institute had paid off -- the proof was in her results.
She received carded funding of €12,000 from the ISC, and Sport Northern Ireland also upped her funding. After all the hard work, things looked to be on the up.
Last year, though, her upward curve did not continue. Even though she was competing, she was suffering from a virus and although she struggled on, her results suffered. She came home from the international circuit last October and took a few weeks out to recover.
She spent the rest of the winter training hard and is now in Australia putting the finishing touches on her preparation to make a bid for the London Olympics. When she returns she will locate to Germany to prepare for the Olympic trial and then hopefully continue on to London.
Although not named in the original round of funding last month, her case is under review.
For most of her career, Craig has had to fund herself so she has learned to be innovative. She set up a T-shirt company called I Am An Eskimo in order to be self-sufficient and works on that her spare time. Things are still not ideal in her sport but they are improving and for now Craig is happy with that. After all, she knows no other way.