Dresden's Tom Liebscher in the run-up to the Canoe World Championships

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IDresden’s Tom Liebscher is chasing the title at the Canoe World Championships in Canada

The two-time Olympic champion is competing in a pre-run this Wednesday in Halifax, the highlight of the year. Can the German K4 confirm its status as a definite gold contender?

Dresden. There will be no big celebration this Wednesday for Dresden canoe racer Tom Liebscher’s 29th birthday. After all, a very important race is scheduled for the two-time Olympic champion at the World Championships in Halifax, Canada, around noon. Together with his teammates Max Rendschmidt (Essen), Jakob Schöf (Berlin) and Max Lemke (Potsdam) he competes in the year’s highlights with a pre-run 4 of over 500 metres. In the past, Foursome was always an almost certain gold candidate, and Liebscher also won the world title with K4 at the final World Championships in 2019.

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But this time the path was more difficult than usual.On the one hand, after the Olympic victory, Ronald Ruhe, a member of a very important team, deserved “retirement”. Jacob Schopf slips into the boat for her. Dresden’s exceptional talent, on the other hand, completed a several-week Bundeswehr course in the fall and therefore missed a few training kilometers. At the first World Cup of the season in Resis in May, the newly formed squad finished fourth behind only Spain, Ukraine and Lithuania. At the second World Cup in Poznan, the four booked a World Cup ticket with second place.

After that, the quartet had enough time to fine-tune the set-up in training. “We have gotten better and better over the past three months and are getting faster and faster,” Tom Liebscher said confidently before leaving for Canada last Sunday. He doesn’t know the world championship route yet: “This is my first world championship abroad. I only know the route from the pictures, it looks very similar to Rio.” He himself has changed position in the boat and is now second instead of third “But it’s not all new to me, because I was sitting in the same position when I won the Olympics in 2016. The special thing is that I am also responsible for the orders there,” explains the disciple of Jens Kuhn, who leaves no doubt about the declared goal in Halifax: “We want to come home with a medal.”

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The successful athlete does not see the World Championships as “the route station for the European Championships in Munich two weeks later”. “Certainly there is a lot of media hype in Munich,” suspects Liebscher, “but as for next year’s sports hype, only the results in Halifax are decisive for us.” The Dresden native sees teams from Spain and Ukraine as the main competitors to fight for the precious metal. Tom Liebscher receives strong support from his parents in Canada, who moved in a few days ago. “It’s a made-up ‘Olympic-Tokyo trip’ for them,” reveals the man from the city of Elbe, who also has his club and training partner Jonas Dregger. The 23-year-old debuts over 200 meters in non-Olympic K1 and has to run for the first time on Thursday.

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by Astrid Hoffman