HSE Students Win Bronze in World Rafting Cup
At the end of July the city of Sagana (Kenya) hosted the World Rafting Cup—the sport’s biggest international competition, drawing competitors from around the world. While it was the debut international tournament for HSE students, they achieved great success, with the Russian crew winning the bronze medal in the Mixed category.
The team included students Vasiliy Khodorych and Mikhail Kulikov of the Bachelor’s in Computational Social Sciences and Aleksey Anisimov of the Bachelor’s in Sociology. Their participation was organised by the Moscow Rafting Federation.
The competition was held under World Rafting Federation (WRF) rules and included four categories: men’s, women’s, mixed (two men and two women to a boat), and para-rafting. The competition lasted three eventful days, each of which required the participants to demonstrate a wide variety of skills, from speed to precision tactics.
The opening event was the Sprint, a discipline that traditionally sets the pace and determines the standings for the rest of the tournament. The goal is simple: traverse a short stretch as quickly as possible and along the optimal line. The cost of failure is high—the teams with the slowest times go up against the strongest opponents in the next stage, so losing at the start is a major barrier to success in later stages.
Several frontrunners already emerged on the first day, including teams from Italy, Czechia, Kenya, and Russia. It was in this discipline that the HSE students showed what they were capable of in the international arena, winning their first bronze medal.
Vasiliy Khodorych
‘The water was choppy and difficult, which often made a direct line unfavourable,’ explained Vasiliy Khodorych, front-left rower of the Russian team. ‘For example, there was a part of the course where it seemed logical to row straight. However, that line would pass through a section with no current, and the raft would have slowed down significantly. The best strategy was to row along the arc of the main current, which gives a significant speed boost.’
On the second day, teams competed in the Rafting Cross (RX), a head-to-head event in which boats start at the same time and follow the same course side by side. Teams advance through the stages just like in football: the winners of the round of 32 go on to the round of 16, and the loser of the semi-finals competes for third place. The RX is considered to be the most dramatic and entertaining stage the competition.
The third and final day of the championship was devoted to the Slalom—the most difficult and technical discipline, requiring extraordinary coordination and synchronisation from competitors. The teams had to flawlessly navigate a difficult course while passing through numerous gates from a specific side and without touching the poles.
Mikhail Kulikov
‘This stage highlights that rafting is an intellectual sport in which a team becomes a single mind,’ said Mikhail Kulikov, back-right rower of the Russian team. ‘In our best attempt—the one where we won third place—we beat the team from Kenya by two seconds. Just two seconds! If we’d accidentally touched the gates once, made one unnecessary stroke, or taken the wrong angle, we would have lost. It’s scary to think about.’
Aleksey Anisimov
According to back-right rower Aleksey Anisimov, the atmosphere at the World Rowing Cup was incredibly friendly. ‘Every country was welcoming to us, and there were a lot of fun and crazy moments—like when we and the Italian team sang ‘Katyusha’ on the bus in Russian and Italian, or after the competition, when we played water polo with a pineapple with teams from Japan, Italy, Czechia, and Kenya, then danced until the morning to songs from all the countries,’ he shared. ‘To commemorate the occasion, we exchanged branded HSE T-shirts and other mech for the uniforms of the Kenyan, Italian, Ugandan, Moroccan, and Japanese teams.
At the close of the competition, the HSE University team displayed impressive results, winning bronze medals in all three disciplines. The gold-medal-winning team included Nikita Zhuravlev—a HSE University graduate, multiple-time medallist and winner of international competitions, and President of the Moscow Rafting Federation. He competed as part of an international team alongside two rowers from the Italian national team.
Nikita Zhuravlev
‘It is particularly special to us that it was students who won one of the first international prizes since the inclusion of rafting in the Moscow Student Sports Games (MSSG). This confirms that our chosen strategy for developing the student side of the sport was right. We are not creating a one-off team, but rather a system that allows young athletes to progress from university training sessions to international competitions,’ shared Nikita Zhuravlev.
He added that this autumn, students will have the opportunity to compete for medals in the first official MSSG rafting tournament, and that the HSE team’s experience at the World Rafting Cup will be a significant landmark for new participants.
