The former head coach for the Lanier Canoe and Kayak Club’s sprint team, Kalen Scholz, has paddled off into her professional future. Taking her place at LCKC is a World Champion medalist by the name of Zsolt Szadovszki.
The new LCKC coach comes to us from the beautiful State of Hawaii, where he began to coach the Hawaii Canoe Kayak Team, HCKT, in 2013.
If you haven’t met him yet, his name is pronounced “Zsolt Szadovszki,” just as it is spelled.
Zsolt’s Bio from Hawaii Canoe and Kayak’s Website
For 13 years, I was a salaried, professional athlete on the Hungarian National Sprint Team. Fast forward to the year 1998, it was the Flat-water Kayak Racing World Championship in Szeged, Hungary. There were over 25,000 spectators cheering for the racers. It was an experience of a lifetime, and I won 2 silver medals in the K4 – four-man kayak.
Then in the year 2000, my kayak partner and I were in the double kayak (K2 500m) at the Hungarian Qualification race for the Sydney Olympics. This division was very strong and only one boat could qualify. The team that defeated us (by less then a half a second) went on to the Sydney Olympic games, winning gold.
If the leaders of the Lake Lanier Canoe & Kayak Club had, say, another 437 years to search the galaxies for a more handsome gentleman to lead the sprint team, they probably would have failed to locate a better icon to represent the Club.
Having spent many hours personally along Honolulu’s Ala Wai Canal watching the magnificence below from my father’s lanai, I hope that Zsolt adapts well to our comparatively bland Gainesville and its appalling lack of shave ice — not to be confused with “snow cones.”
The Lanier Canoe and Kayak Club is a 501(c)(3) organization that is dedicated to continuing the 1996 Olympic legacy of promoting the sports of flatwater canoe and kayak on Lake Lanier.
The club offers everything between one day recreational opportunities to feeder programs for the U.S. National Teams for flatwater racing in dragon boat and canoe/kayak. It hosts a number of programs and events each year that support local, regional, national, and international flatwater programs.
Bio of LCKC Sprint Team Head Coach Zsolt Szadovszki
