Jack Laban secures the fourth race

By Vaelei Von Dincklage • 23 June 2021, 3:00PM

The fourth race of the Taula V1 Race that was held last weekend at the Taumeasina Island Resort sees Jack Laban back in the lead again.

Samoa Vaatasi organizing team member Georgina Daisy Poulava told the Samoa Observer in an interview how much the sport has progressed from the first race up to the fourth race held last weekend.

The Taula V1 series was taken to Taumeasina for the first time and she believes it helped them to look at the different courses offered by the different venues.

"Well, this is a new venue for us because we normally have it at Mulinuu, but we wanted to change the venue for us just to have a look at the different courses that can be done around this area," she said.

"I have seen some progress, there are about two or three extra people from the last time we had the race. These people have paddled before but they just came back to the sport."

"The progress that we have [made] today is that we shifted beyond the reef, we never went beyond it, but we wanted to have a slight change because of the low tide, and it also depends on the tide.

"For us, that is one of the factors that we have to look at when we have a regatta, we have to look at the tides, we don't want it to be low tide because it is going to be steady, we want something that keeps the boats moving all the time."

Few juniors have shown their interest in the sport by participating in the race and a crowd of supporters were also on hand to see the sporting event at the resort.

There have been slight changes to the rankings and Ms Poulava says that the athletes have been training very hard and it was proven by their performance at the weekend.

"The rankings for today, the top three people are still the same but they just moved around. Some who were in seventh place have moved upwards to 5th or 6th place. There is one elderly who participated in the long course and he finished it, he is really motivated to finish it because he saw people paddling."

"I also want to thank our sponsors Taula and Taxi for their support, they have taken a huge step by providing a lot of prizes for our competition.

So the next race should be in July because we have the race every month, the date is yet to be confirmed. I think the course will roughly be the same but at a different venue next time."

The results for the Taula V1 Series fourth race are as follows:

Open Men's