Anastasiia Chetverikova dedicated her gold to her family stuck in Ukraine, Sebastian Brendel and Tim Hecker declared a golden double at this year’s world championships is on their radar, and Slovenia’s Anja Osterman made it two from two over 200 metres on the final day of the ICF canoe sprint world cup in Poznan.

Non-Olympic events attracted strong fields on a compact final day of racing which saw two days of competition squeezed into one because of bad weather on Saturday.

Chetverikova, racing on her own in the absence of C2 partner Liudmyla Luzan through illness, cruised to victory in the C1 500.

“It’s very important for me, its very important for my country,” Chetverikova said.

“I win this medal for all people in my country because we are very strong, from the sportspeople to the people, Ukrainians everywhere.

“My parents are in my city, it’s a very hard situation there, I can support my family only with this medal.”

Triple Olympic champion Sebastian Brendel and Tim Hecker have set their sights on a golden C2 double at this year’s ICF canoe sprint world championships in Canada after once again winning the non-Olympic C2 1000.

But Hecker said their big focus is to get stronger in the new Olympic event of the C2 500.

“We didn’t manage the 500 very well, so we weren’t happy about the result, so we wanted to make it right with the 1000 metre,” he said.

Brendel said he is focused on getting to his fourth Olympic Games.

“It’s the first year after the Olympics so we are focused on the world championships. The world cups were for testing. We have learned we need to do a lot of fast training in the 500 metres in the next months,” Brendel said.

“I’m still having fun with training and I’m enjoying competing, so we would like to be in Paris in 2024.”

Anja Osterman showed her win over the former Olympic distance of 200 metres in Racice last week was no fluke, with another strong win on Sunday.

The Slovenian has been training in Slovakia

“I was really tired this morning when I went into the 500 finals, but now I had a different mindset, I wanted to win it,” she said.

“I didn’t feel perfect, but I went hard. Not just today has been hard, this week I feel like I have been racing for three weeks, it was delay after delay, but I guess it was hard for everyone. I’m just happy that I won.”

Canada will host this year’s ICF canoe sprint and paracanoe world championships, and showed they will be in the thick of the medal action after winning four gold medals and 11 medals overall in Poznan.

The medals from the paracanoe and canoe sprint competitions were shared between 24 different countries, including first-time paracanoe medals for India and Israel.

Pics by Bence Vekassy