Slovakia wins another bronze medal

Slovakia's favourites to win the Olypmic kayak four competition managed a bronze medal on Friday morning, losing the 1km race to teams from Hungary and Germany. The Slovak team of Michal and Richard Riszdorfer, Juraj Baca and Erik Vlcek had been unbeaten for 2.5 years and could boast four world championships and three European titles. But they could not recover from a bad start which saw them lying seventh at the 250m mark and which left them too much to do despite a better performance in the second half of the race. However, Richard Riszdorfer is glad to have even the bronze medal.

Riszdorfer says that the team followed exactly the tactics they prepared during training and paddled as well as they could.

At Sydney 2000, Slovakia came fourth in the same event loosing the bronze medal by just one hundredth of a second behind the Polish team.