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Irish twins agonisingly miss out on the medals at Canoe World Championships

Kildare’s Noel and Robert Hendrick finished fourth in Brazil.

Updated at 22.45

KILDARE TWINS NOEL and Robert Hendrick just missed out on the medals as they finished fourth at the Junior/U23 World Championship in Brazil.

The 17-year-olds’ time of 113.91 wasn’t enough to overtake Germany’s Niklas Hecht and Alexander Weber (111.55) for the bronze medals in the C2 Men Junior class.

French duo Guillaume Graille and Lucas Roisin took gold in 108.25 while the Czech pair of Michael Matejka and Jan Vetrovsky won silver with a time of 109.64.

It is not the first time that Roisin has denied the Hendricks. France’s rising star won gold at the Youth Olympics in Nanjing last year, beating Robert, who took silver, by just eight-tenths of a second.

“I am delighted with the guys’ result, it’s a product of all their hard work with the coach Eoin Rheinisch and shows that our canoe slalom programme continues to produce world-class results,” Karl Dunne, Chief Executive of Canoeing Ireland,” told The42.

“The fact that the guys started canoeing via our paddlefest programme that is the brain child of our new president Paul Donnelly shows that Canoeing Ireland is starting to achieve key strategic goals.”

Dunne added that the result was “bittersweet,” given that the duo came so close to claiming silverware.

“It’s still an excellent result and one of the best they ever achieved in C2,” he said.

“I was speaking to Eoin and he was telling me they really upped their performance from the semi-finals to achieve the result.

“After an initial disappointment [on just missing out on a medal], they’ve accepted that it’s a great result.”

The Chief Executive consequently feels the outcome will do wonders for the future of the sport in Ireland.

“It has a big impact because it shows that our junior squads and the systems we have in place are actually starting to produce results. It inspires our younger athletes coming up, as they regularly see the two Hendrick brothers, they train with them at the weekend in the club. And the competition they inspire creates better paddlers.”

With this positive result behind them, the duo can now look forward to the European Junior Championships in two months’ time.

Additional reporting by Paul Fennessy

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