KIMBERLEY Woods returned to the venue that hosted the 2012 Olympic canoe slalom to secure her place in the Under-23 Great Britian team.
The Rugby-based star was in action at the Lea Valley Course at the weekend which hosted the Premier 1 and Premier 2 races.
The iconic venue hosted the 2012 Olympic Games and over the wekened it staged the first two National Premier Division races of the year combined with the under-23 GB team selection event.
The premier races were a standard format race with the best of two runs deciding the winner, whereas the GB Selection used the first Premier race results as race one and both legs of race two to decide who would represent GB in the world championships in Brazil
The course designers presented athletes with two challenging courses over the weekend, which were designed with fast racing in mind and produced very competitive racing across all classes.
On the Saturday Woods in the Kayak Class set the fastest time on the first run but was relegated to third place by incurring four seconds of penalties for touching two gates.
On her second run she maintained her position but importantly was the first boat in the Under 23 selection series gaining maximum points.
In The Canadian class Woods was the only paddler to do a particularly difficult move forward but paid the price by having too much speed into the next section and only managed to finish third.
The following day saw Woods set a new pace in the Canadian class leading the field by over two seconds after the first run.
On the second she had a stunning run knocking over nine seconds of her time and leading the field by nearly ten seconds and secured her place in the GB team.
In the Kayak she had a reasonable first run coming third overall but failed to improve in the second runs dropping to fourth place overall and second in the under 23 selected again in the GB Team. Woods was the only paddler competing in both classes at the selection and doing eight competitive runs over two days had possibly taken its toll on her last run
