Egan gearing up for a telling year on international front
By Leopold Herter
ICF WORLD Cup and World Canoe Marathon Championship medallist Jenny Egan from Lucan is looking forward to an important year, as the 32-year-old attempts to grasp the chance of qualifying for the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020.
While she has proven a hugely successful com-petitor over 5000m and marathon distance, Egan has been, more recently, focusing on the shorter 500m and 200m ranges, as her long-distance speciality is not on the Olympic programme.
Lucan’s Jenny Egan is already back preparing for another massive year of top international canoeing, hoping also to clinch a place in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo
As part of her prepar-ation for the new season, Egan travels to the US in February for some early warm-weather training.
“I will go to Florida, Orlando for five weeks on the 1st of February” Egan told The Echo. “There, I will train in Clermont with the Danish Women Kayak Team.”
The Irish woman has good relations with the Danish national team and their coach and will relish the opportunity to train with the squad which includes 2016 Olympic silver medallist Emma Jorgensen.
Egan, who has already trained in places like Spain, Portugal and Italy, is looking forward to the trip to North America, but stressed “it’s not the place, it’s the people who are good to train with.”
The competition programme starts a few weeks later with two major competitions in the Czech Republic in May, namely a European Olympic Qualifier followed by the ICF World Cup 1.
Following that, The Echo Sports Star of 2017 will focus on her last chance to qualify for Tokyo at the World Cup 2 in Duisburg, Germany where she already won a bronze medal at last year’s event.
The Lucan woman will then turn her attention to the European Senior Championships in Romania from June 4-7 before getting the chance to finally compete in the K1 1000m and 5000m discipline at the World Championship in Hungary.
Her participation in the latter will depend on whether or not she is successful in her bid to qualify for the Olympics although she will certainly be hoping to contest the Marathon World Championships in Norway at the end of August.
Supported by various bodies including Sports Ireland, Olympic Feder-ation of Ireland, Canoeing Ireland and Salmon Leap Club, Egan has also been the athlete representative on Sport Ireland’s ‘Women In Sport’ steering committee since March.
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