Marcus Cooper: “I enjoy doing something superhuman”

Marcus Cooper Walz will be Spain’s flag bearer at the opening ceremony of the Paris Games next Friday. Born in Oxford in 1994 and raised in Mallorca, this nervous and optimistic young man found his second home in a kayak. After winning gold in a single-person boat at Rio 2016, in Tokyo 2021 he became the driving force behind the K-4, the four-man kayak that won silver in the 500-metre sprint, and which now heads the fleet that Spain is sending to the Paris Games to compete in the 16 canoeing events at the Vaires-sur-Marne nautical stadium from 27 July to 10 August. After leading the medal table together with Germany at last year’s World Championships, the Spanish can be considered a powerhouse. Paddle sport is by far the mine from which the delegation hopes to extract the most prizes.

Ask. Why has Spain become the country that is making the most progress in canoeing?

Answer. We are doing a good job: the canoeists, the technicians, the health workers and the federation. It is rotating: the better the results we get, the younger ones have no other objective than to equal them. When they start competing at an international level, in junior categories, the objective of the boys is to be on the podium. Yes or yes. They train every day with that mentality. One of the advantages we have over other countries is that we are concentrated in high-performance centres all year round from juniors. That, together with the climate and food, helps Spain a lot.

P. Is the weather a determining factor?

R. Canoeing is a summer sport. Canoeists from northern Europe travel to Spain to train because in winter the reservoirs freeze over.

P. Do you think that food represents a strategic advantage?

R. Yes. We are what we eat. It is our fuel. And in Spain we eat well. This is a cultural sign that is transferred to our sport and makes us better than other countries, where athletes eat simply to fill their stomach. This is a precision sport, like Formula One. The day you don’t eat well you notice a drop in glucose. It’s as if your battery suddenly runs out. It’s the typical crash. You get ravenously hungry because you lack energy to transform into kilocalories, and that comes mainly from carbohydrates.

P. Is energy efficiency the key to withstanding lactic acid after one minute of maximum effort?

R. In the last 100 meters of a 500m you have sky-high lactate levels. The Olympic sprint is a totally lactic acid sport. It’s a killer. You feel it all over your body, in every muscle. It’s one of the worst sensations I’ve ever felt in my life. You live with it and you train it every day with lactic acid tolerance exercises. We take nutritional supplements that are inhibitors because they delay the production of lactic acid and we work on it to live with it. So that, even if it hits you hard, you can continue paddling with the right technique. Even if you can’t increase your speed, let it drop as little as possible.

P. How does the body experience the degradation of technique due to exhaustion?

R. The legs and arms get tired because they have to make an extra effort compared to the torso and waist area. The arms have a lot of technical range: the force goes from the hand to the footrest, which is where we push, and the torso moves thanks to the impulse of the legs. If the limbs get tired, the torso rotates worse because the impulse of the lever from the blade in the water to the canoe on the footrest is transferred less well. The legs do not need to be as strong, but they must be resistant.

P. Spain is probably the best country in the world for team sports. Is canoeing a team sport?

R. The best four paddlers in the world do not necessarily make the best K-4. This discipline is not individual at all. K-4 is not just a sport of strength, endurance and performance. Synchronisation with the rest of the team is extremely important. It is like in football: to get the ball from goal to goal and score it, you need synchronisation. If the four best paddlers in the world push like beasts, that is not enough. The trick is that all four of them push in exactly the same way. The push with the legs, the twisting of the hips, the arms and the paddle in the water must move at the same time. It is like pushing a wall between four people. The wall can only be moved if all four push together. If one pushes two seconds later, the wall falls on top of you.

P. How is synchronization achieved?

R. It’s something you don’t see. You feel it when you’re paddling and it seems like the kayak is levitating on the water, as light as if it were flying, without the drag of the liquid. You notice it a lot in the propulsion of your legs and hips. It is thought that this is a question of arms, but nothing could be further from the truth. Inside the canoe, it is very important that the hips move forward and back; we do a lot of synchronization work from the waist down. If we don’t synchronize our legs, we get much more tired, and a canoeist with tired legs is lethal, useless. If you also have strength and resistance, all the better, but the key is coordination. There are countries that lift many more kilos than us in the gym. They are beasts. You see those from Lithuania and they seem twice as much as us, and yet their K-4 doesn’t sail like ours. Putting in watts doesn’t mean that they are useful for pushing efficiently. This is a cause for concern in day-to-day training. You have to have muscle mass, but the muscle must be effective. Muscle weight should never upset the balance of strength, endurance and power. Being ‘super-buff’ doesn’t mean we’re going to go faster. I’ve been training since I was 12 and if I wanted to I could be like a bodybuilder. I’m not, because that’s not what matters. The bigger the muscle, the more it consumes and the more it tires. This is a sport of infinite details.

P. Many athletes experience a moment of spiritual enlightenment. Do you practice canoeing because you seek that supreme pleasure or because you simply like to compete and win?

R. I enjoy knowing that I am doing something superhuman. Not because anyone can’t do it, but because the average person is not willing to do it. Most people are not willing to do what I do. I know that I am pushing my body and mind to the limit. I really enjoy pushing myself: seeing where I can go. My way of staying motivated after winning an Olympic gold is by setting myself increasingly difficult challenges. That’s why after winning gold in Rio in K-1 I got into K-4, which is tremendously more difficult. Now in Paris my challenge is to participate in two events: K-4 and K-2. Even though there is only half an hour between the two finals. I want to do two 500m in half an hour, something that no one else can do at the highest level.

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