South Africa have won seven gold medals at the 2026 African Canoe Sprint Championships in Algeria, the tally at the time of publishing as the closing day’s programme runs down. Esti Olivier has taken three of them, Alexa Godden three, Hamish Lovemore the senior men’s K1 1000 m, and Henry van der Walt the senior men’s K1 200 m. This is the 13th edition of the championships, organised by the Confederation of African Canoeing and hosted by the Algerian Rowing and Canoe-Kayak Federation.
The racing is on Keddara Dam in Boumerdès Province, inland from the Mediterranean coast east of Algiers. The competition window runs from 8 to 12 October, with the opening ceremony on Friday 9 October and the last medals decided today.
Nearly 150 paddlers entered, from around a dozen countries: Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Senegal, Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe, Mozambique, Cape Verde, South Africa, Djibouti and Kenya. Fields were small, between three and eight boats, so every race was run as a direct final with no heats or semi-finals and one race settled each title. The programme was split by distance rather than by age group, with the 1000 m races on Saturday, the 500 m races on Sunday and the 200 m sprints and paracanoe on Monday.
The South African gold medals thus far:
- 🥇 Hamish Lovemore — senior men’s K1 1000 m, 3:38.44
- 🥇 Henry van der Walt — senior men’s K1 200 m
- 🥇 Esti Olivier and Alexa Godden — senior women’s K2 500 m
- 🥇 Esti Olivier — senior women’s K1 500 m
- 🥇 Esti Olivier — senior women’s K1 200 m
- 🥇 Alexa Godden — under-23 women’s K1 500 m
- 🥇 Alexa Godden — under-23 women’s K1 200 m
Hamish Lovemore Wins The K1 1000 m At The African Canoe Sprint Championships
Lovemore won the senior men’s K1 1000 m on Saturday in 3:38.44, and the water behind him was empty. Tunisia’s Mohamed Ali Mrabet was next home in 3:47.63 and Cape Verde’s Diogo Araujo third in 3:48.00, which left Lovemore more than nine seconds clear in a race that lasted under four minutes, according to the times published by paddlestats.
Lovemore, who paddles out of Umdloti in KwaZulu-Natal, finished ninth overall in the K1 1000 m at the Paris Olympics in 2024, winning the B final in 3:27.94. He has taken silver in the K1 5000 m at each of the last two world championships, in Milan in 2025 and in Poznań in August, and won silver over the Olympic 1000 m distance and bronze in the 5000 m at the World Cup regatta in Brandenburg in May.
Henry van der Walt Golden On His Only Start
Van der Walt, a Tuks paddler from Gauteng, sat out the first two days of the regatta without a race and then won the senior men’s K1 200 m at the first time of asking on Monday. PaddleSport South Africa, the national federation, confirmed the win and noted that he had waited two days for the chance.
Three Golds Each For Esti Olivier And Alexa Godden
Olivier and Godden won the senior women’s K2 500 m on Sunday morning, and Olivier came back later the same day to win the senior K1 500 m on her own. She treated the second race as a time trial rather than a tactical scrap.
“Conditions were a little bit better than in the K2 this morning, so I opted to go for a proper time trial-type race and try and get a good time and a good feeling on the course.” – Esti Olivier
She said then that she was ready for the 200 m, and on Monday she took that title too, which the federation called the race that wrapped up her championships.
Godden’s own week was the bigger surprise. The federation confirmed her as under-23 African champion in the K1 500 m on Sunday, then as champion again in the K1 200 m on Monday morning, which makes her a double champion in her own age group on top of the senior title she shares with Olivier. She stood on the podium in the green and gold at the 500 m ceremony with the dam and its bare shoreline behind her.
Olivier is South Africa’s leading senior women’s sprinter and coaches the Academy of Canoe Development at Roodeplaat Dam outside Pretoria. She won three golds at the 2019 African Games in Rabat, in the K1 200 m, the K1 500 m and the K4 500 m, and took the K1 500 m and K2 500 m titles at the 2023 African Championships in Abuja, each time bringing home Olympic quota places for South Africa.
“Another incredible performance by the South Africans. This sport is definitely not for sissies and we seem to just get stronger all the time.” – 🎙️Jay
Inside Keddara Dam, The Course For These Championships
Keddara is not a purpose-built regatta course. It is a drinking-water reservoir for Algiers, held back by an earth and rock-fill embankment with a central clay core standing 106 m high across the Oued Boudouaou, completed in 1987 by the Yugoslav firm Hidrotehnika. The reservoir holds roughly 146.5 million cubic metres, topped up by transfers from the Hamiz Dam to the west and the Beni Amrane Dam to the east.
The Boudouaou rises in the Khachna mountains and runs north to the Mediterranean. Mount Bouzegza, at 1,033 m, stands above the far end of the water, and those hills are what keep the surface flat enough to race on. Because the catchment above the dam holds no large towns and no industrial zones, the water stays unusually clean for a reservoir that close to a capital city, with published water-quality studies rating it between acceptable and excellent.
The geology under all of it is restless. Northern Algeria sits on the line where the African and Eurasian plates push into one another, and the Tell Atlas, the range the Khachna massifs belong to, is what that collision has thrown up. The faults in the region are thrust faults, built by compression rather than sideways slip.
One of them moved on 21 May 2003. The magnitude 6.8 Zemmouri earthquake struck with its epicentre offshore near Boumerdès and killed more than 2,200 people. Accelerometers fitted to Keddara Dam recorded strong motions, and the embankment itself came through the shaking intact, while the conduit connections carrying its water to the treatment plant were damaged.
Keeping water in it is the harder problem. Drought in recent seasons pulled the reservoir down into low single figures as a percentage of capacity, and rain early this year recovered it only to around 20 per cent. The exposed rock along the shoreline still shows how far the level has fallen.
How These Titles Count Towards Los Angeles 2028
The regatta was designated as awarding ranking points on the qualification pathway to the Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028, under the International Canoe Federation, which relaunched this year as Paddle Worldwide.
Lovemore, Olivier and Godden have all been building towards that since the start of the year. At the South African Canoe Sprint Championships at Roodeplaat Dam in late March, Lovemore won four gold medals in two days, sweeping the K1 1000 m, 500 m and 5000 m and adding the K2 500 m alongside Denmark’s Jonathan Dagnaes. Olivier won the K1 500 m and the K1 200 m at the same regatta, then took both K2 races with Godden.
