Five days after the conclusion of the 2007 FISA World Rowing Junior Championships, the "Good Luck Beijing" 2007 Canoe/Kayak Slalom Open will open at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park on August 16. As Xin Qunying, deputy director of the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park, said at a pre-tournament press conference held this morning, "A number of top athletes will come to Beijing to compete in this Canoe/Kayak Slalom Open. So it's going to be a world-class canoe/kayak slalom event. So far all preparations have been going smoothly."

According to Xin, by August 13 110 athletes from 25 countries and regions had applied for participation in the Beijing event. At present, 105 athletes have registered, among whom many are the top 10 paddlers in each of the individual events, including Tony of France, Olympic champion in the men's C-1 at Athens 2004, and Martiken of Slovakia, who currently tops the world rankings; the top three kayakists in the German team, a powerhouse in the sport; and Dukatova Jana of Slovakia, who ranks first in world women's kayaking.

At present, other preparatory work for the "Good Luck Beijing" Canoe/Kayak Slalom Open has also been completed. Two rehearsals have been conducted, to the satisfaction of the International Canoe Federation, the world government body of the sport. According to Xin Qunying, who is also deputy director of the Water Sports Administrative Center under the General Administration of Sport, canoe/kayak slalom is an event most spectacular in the Olympic Games. In slalom racing, paddlers have to navigate the kayak or canoe through pairs of poles, called "gates", set up over the challenging rapids, waves, eddies and currents on a 300m stretch of rough water. If the paddler touches one of the poles, or misses a gate altogether, penalty times are added to the time achieved by the competitor on that run. Paddlers are entitled to question the penalty decided by the judges after the race, and get their final results through the assessment of the arbitration commission.

This time, a total of 35 Chinese athletes have entered their names for all the events to be contested. As Xin Qunying said, "Tthe overall ranking of the Chinese team is now around No. 10 in the world. Breakthroughs may be made in individual events. But we still lag far behind those strong teams. Comparatively speaking, we are good at the men's C-2 and the women's events, and these are exactly the events in which we expect to make some breakthroughs at next year's Olympic Games." 

Canoe/kayak slalom originated in Switzerland in 1932. At first, athletes competed in still water. Not long after, people began to compete in torrential rivers. Over the last hundred years the competition rules and regulations and equipment have all been greatly improved. At Barcelona 1992, canoe/kayak slalom was included as an official event of the Olympic Games.