Of all the international athletes competing at the International Canoe Federation Slalom World Championships this week, few can boast the connection with Sydney that Sona Stanovska can.
Slovakia’s Stanovska, who was born just a handful of months before the Olympic Games Sydney 2000, spent two years of her life attending a Sydney high school – the same school as Noemie Fox and Jessica Fox.
Her father and coach, Miroslav Stanovsky, a former Olympic paddler, decided to relocate the family, and especially Sona and her older brother, Martin, to Australia ahead of the 2014 ICF Junior and U23 World Championships in Penrith.
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Sona was too young to compete, but spent two years travelling to the famous Penrith Whitewater Stadium every afternoon after school for training. And now, this week, she’s back at the stadium, and this time competing for gold.
It’s been a tough year though for the 25-year-old. She began in a blaze of glory.
“The top of the season was really perfect, I was fourth at the European Championships and then I won the gold at the first World Cup,” Stanovska said.
“Then in Prague I was third in the kayak cross, so having two medals, it was even more than I expected.
“But then I got a little injured and the second part of my season was not that good. I’m trying my best, but let’s see. It’s still not over.”
Annoyingly for Stanovska it was a silly little injury, not the result of anything in the canoe, but actually on the bank of the water. But nasty enough to keep her out of her boat for a couple of weeks.
“We went for a training camp in Augsburg, and I slipped and fell over,” she said.
“It was really unlucky, on the riverbank after my first run. It was not a good start to the training camp, but this is sport. I hurt a muscle in my leg, and it was really unlucky because I couldn’t really sit in my boat, not in C1, not in K1, so I was out of my boat for a long time.”
The remainder of the European season suffered as a result, but Stanovska is not getting hung up about it. Injuries, she said, are part of all sports, and it’s the way athletes deal with them that makes a difference.
“I think it was more a mental thing, that I knew I had done everything correct but one stupid mistake put me out of all my training. But I tried my best to refocus before the World Cups,” she said.
“Sometimes injuries happen and this time it happened to me.
“It’s always hard when you get injured, especially for us as athletes, but I’m not the type of person who would say that it is all over. I try to refocus and do my best, even if not everything is perfect.”
Stanovska is one of Canoe Slalom’s hardest working and most driven athletes. For most of her senior paddling career she’s balanced her paddling with her legal studies, and is now just a few months away from completing her legal studies.
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Asking her what she prefers doing is like asking a parent to name their favourite child, She loves both, and has been attacking them with equal gusto.
“I had to split the last year of my studies because I want to keep paddling, so this year will hopefully be my last year of studying law, which is kind of hard, but I really enjoy it. I always take the hardest way, not the easiest one,” Stanovska said.
“I love my studies, I love my university, but I also love this sport of paddling. I try to both as perfect as I can.
“I really want a job in law, maybe become a judge or to be in advocacy, so we will see.”
So what does Stanovska hope to achieve in slalom before she hangs up her paddle and dons the legal silks?
“Of course I have a dream, but I never talk about them because I want to keep it to myself,” she said.
What she would like is to revisit 2023, a year when she won U23 World Championships gold, then finished her first degree to become a Bachelor in law. She also began a relationship with “a really good man who I want to spend the rest of my life with”.
The pressure of law is also proving useful for Stanovska as she copes with being an elite athlete in a sport which is front and centre in Slovakia.
“It’s our most successful sport in Slovak history, we have a lot of big names, still in the sport, like (two-time Olympic gold medalist) Michal Martikan,” she said.
“But I feel for the younger generation it is motivation for us to become as good as they were. I’ve changed my coach to Jana Dukatova, a world champion, and she has given me a lot of motivation to be as good at least as she was.”
Stanovska has always loved Sydney. And this week she’s hoping to cement that relationship even further.
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