Congratulations to Hamish Lovemore, who closed the 2026 ICF Canoe Sprint and Paracanoe World Championships in Poznań with silver in the men’s K1 5 000m — the last race of the regatta, and South Africa’s only medal of the week.
Hamish Lovemore spent most of it sitting fourth. Twenty-four minutes on the Malta Regatta Course, a four-boat lead group, and the 27-year-old from Umdloti tucked in on the wash where nobody would have written a headline about him.
Then the line came into view and he went.
Past Norway’s Amund Vold. Past Mads Brandt Pedersen — the Dane chasing a fourth successive world title over the distance, and the man who had been finishing in front of Lovemore in 5 000m and marathon racing for two years. Only Fernando Pimenta stayed out of reach, 1.45 seconds up the road.
🥇 Fernando Pimenta (Portugal) — 24:15.72
🥈 Hamish Lovemore (South Africa) — 24:17.17
🥉 Mads Brandt Pedersen (Denmark) — 24:18.17
Amund Vold of Norway was fourth in 24:22.22. Three of the four inside seven seconds of each other after five kilometres of paddling, which tells you how the closing 200 metres actually looked.
It is the same medal Hamish Lovemore took home from Milan in 2025. Same event, same colour, same late kick — two World Championships in a row now finished on the second step.
“Nobody hands you a world medal for sitting in fourth — Hamish LOVEMORE went and took it off a man who has spent two years beating him!” – 🎙️Jay
The man he could not catch is worth understanding. Pimenta is 37, and four days before the 5 000m he had won the Olympic-distance K1 1 000m in 3:24.39, holding off Hungary’s Bálint Kopasz by 0.22 seconds to become the oldest world champion the distance has produced. Poznań gave the Portuguese a 1 000m and 5 000m double. Lovemore did not run into a random flyer on Sunday. He ran into a career.
Pedersen is the more personal one. The Dane has been the recurring obstacle in exactly the races Lovemore is built for — long, tactical, decided in the final surge. Getting past him with a world title on the line, even for silver, is the result that will sit with the South African longer than the medal itself.
The Olympic problem
The 5 000m is not an Olympic event. The 1 000m is, and that is where the week gets more complicated.
His semi-final over the Olympic distance contained both men who would go on to take gold and silver in the A final. He finished fourth in that heat, missed the A final by one place, then won the B final. TimesLIVE and Team SA both had Hamish Lovemore 10th overall for the 1 000m.
So the silver is a celebration and a consolation at the same time. The medal is real and it is his. The ranking points that matter most to a Los Angeles 2028 campaign were sitting in the race he did not reach.
South Africa sent three paddlers to a start list drawn from 79 nations. Alongside the silver and the B-final win, Bridgitte Hartley — the 43-year-old London 2012 Olympic bronze medallist, still going — finished sixth in the 1 000m B final and 15th in the 5 000m. Esti Olivier was seventh in the 500m C final and eighth in her 200m semi, so no final.
One medal from three athletes reads thin on a table. It is also an honest picture of where flatwater sprint sits in South African sport, and of how much of the senior men’s brief Lovemore is carrying on his own.
His route into it was the KwaZulu-Natal one. Born on 19 August 1999, he picked up a paddle at 15 after watching his older brother Tom, and came up through the Dusi and the Fish — river racing, not still water. He was U23 marathon world champion in 2022. He went to Paris 2024 and finished ninth overall in the K1 1 000m, and raced the K2 500m alongside Andy Birkett, whose family he had lived with in the build-up.
What followed was the interesting part. A marathon and river specialist committing properly to sprint after the Olympics, and then stacking medals in it: World Cup silver over 1 000m in Brandenburg in May, two silvers at the 2025 World Games in Chengdu, and now back-to-back World Championship silvers over 5 000m. He is OPEX-funded and backed by Euro Steel, which is why the news broke on their page before it reached the wires.
Shaun Rubenstein, a former world champion and now a Paddle South Africa board member, framed the next three years around consistency rather than any single result — the new Olympic qualification system rewards paddlers who keep turning up on podiums, and Hamish Lovemore has medalled at every international he has contested this year. On that trajectory, Rubenstein’s read is that Los Angeles is a medal conversation and not a wish.
There is still a Pedersen problem in some races, and a Pimenta-and-Kopasz problem in the Olympic distance. Nobody in South African canoeing is pretending otherwise.
But this is a late-kick specialist off the Dusi who has turned himself into a world-level 5 000m paddler and a credible 1 000m threat inside two years, and who has now left two consecutive World Championships with silver around his neck.
This time he did it by running down the man who used to own him.
Photo by Euro Steel Sport
