To understand a family war you always need a context, who is who, how it all started ...

Spanish canoeing has six extraordinary paddlers: three Olympic champions,

Saúl Craviotto, Cristian Toro

and

Marcus Cooper

, two world champions,

Rodrigo Germade

and

Carlos Garrote

and a world runner-up,

Carlos Arévalo

.

By record, all six should go to the Tokyo Olympics, but because of the limit of participants, only four can go.

And those four, furthermore, have to form a very close team to defeat the great rival, Germany, in the K4 500. How do you decide who those four are?

There it is mess.

For years, before each major championship, the technicians of the Spanish Canoeing Federation carry out controls to check which paddlers arrive in the best shape and choose the best.

At the 2018 European Championship, for example, Craviotto, Toro, Cooper and Germade and for the 2019 World Cup, Toro - in poor shape - was replaced by Arévalo.

The controls consist of a series of individual tests, where it is measured who is the fastest, and some joint tests, where it is studied who is the best synchronized.

By the Tokyo Games, almost everything was open again.

Only Craviotto, a possible flag bearer, and Arevalo, representative in K1, had fixed places, but the other two positions were up for grabs.

Or not.

According to the complaint made this Tuesday by the Lugo Fluvial Club, which represents Cristian Toro, and

Juan José Román Mangas

, former president of the Federation, four members "rigged" the controls to secure the position.

The entity in a statement and the former leader in statements to 'La 8 Zamora' accused Craviotto, Arévalo, Cooper and Germade, the four who attended the last World Cup, of deliberately excluding Toro and Garrote from the process.

How they did it?

According to the complainants, without making an effort when Toro and Garrote got into the kayak and giving their 100% without them.

The times of the controls, whether or not the complaint is true, were really strange.

In the tests that took place last weekend on the Trasona channel, the results were not normal.

With Garrote y Toro along with the fixed Craviotto and Arévalo, a time of 1m24s was set.

With Toro along with Craviotto, Arévalo and Cooper that 1m24s was repeated.

And with the four defendants already on the canoe, without Garrote and Toro, the clock stopped at 1m20s, with an exaggerated reduction of four seconds.

"There has been a fix on the K4 selective. There has been no fair play," Mangas said with those records in hand.

The rarity of the times has already forced the Federation to temporarily suspend the controls, but after the complaints of these days it has directly chosen to reformulate them and start from scratch.

It is difficult to know what will happen, but the family war, already unstoppable, will not help the preparation of the Olympic Games.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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