Canoe Singles (C1), 200 metres, Women

As the Olympics was aiming at gender equality, this event débuted, replacing the men’s C-1 200 metres. The women’s C-1 200 became an ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships event for the first time in 2010.

Canada’s six-time C-1 200 world champion, Laurence Vincent-Lapointe, was unexpectedly disqualified from the 2019 World Championships at the last minute due to a positive doping test, thus paving the way for the American teenager Nevin Harrison to win the title. Vincent-Lapointe refuted all the charges, which lead to her suspension from competition. In January 2020, the ICF accepted Lapointe’s evidence, supporting that she was the victim of a third-party contamination and she was cleared retroactively of all the charges and allowed to return to training and competition.

Vincent-Lapointe and Harrison both easily won their preliminaries in Tokyo and directly qualified into the semi-final, where they took part in the same heat. Harrison finished first, ahead of Lin Wenjun of China, and Vincent-Lapointe. In the A Final, Harrison made a flying start from lane four and keeping up her pace, finally crossing the line 0.854 seconds ahead of Vincent-Lapointe and thus winning the USA’s first ever female canoe sprint gold medal at the Olympic Games.

In 2015 Harrison suffered a hip injury that seemed to put an end to her athletic dreams, but she did not give up. She first tried herself in kayak, but did not find it challenging enough, so she turned to canoe and six years later she was the first ever women’s Olympic C-1 200 gold medal winner.