MADRID, 22 (EUROPA PRESS)
The Spanish women's K4 500m team was crowned world champion on Friday by winning the final of the World Canoeing Sprint Championships, which is being held in Milan (Italy), a third day in which Pablo Graña won the silver medal in the C1 200m and in which the men's K4 500m and Àngels Moreno and Viktoriia Yarchevska, in the C2 500m, won two bronze medals.
At the Idroscalo in the Lombard capital, Sara Ouzande, Lucía Val, Estefanía Fernández, and Bárbara Pardo, who as a team had already won gold in Szeged (Hungary) at the first World Cup of the season, staged a spectacular comeback to the world title.
They crossed the 250-meter buoy in third place, behind Belarus and China, and pushed hard in the final meters. They finished first, stopping the clock at 1:32.58, with the Chinese and Belarusian teams completing the podium.
Meanwhile, Galician Pablo Graña took silver in the C1 200 meters, the distance for which he is the reigning European champion, and his third medal of 2025—after a gold and a silver—was only beaten—by just three hundredths of a second—by Uzbekistan's Artur Guliev, who took gold, and Russian Sergey Svinarev finished third.
In the men's K4 500 meters, where Spain claimed a bronze medal at the Paris Olympics, the national team repeated their medal streak with bronze on Friday. Without Olympians Saúl Craviotto and Marcus Cooper, and with Adrián del Río and Alex Graneri completing the field alongside Carlos Arévalo and Rodrigo Germade, the team crossed the finish line in 1:19.33, just four-tenths of a second behind the world champions, Portugal.
Spain was in the lead at the first 250 meters, but gradually lost ground to the pressure of the Portuguese boat and Hungary, which took the silver medal.
The fourth medal of the day for the Spanish delegation, another bronze, came from Àngels Moreno and Viktoriia Yarchevska in the C2 500 meters. With a time of 1:54.84, the Spanish duo finished almost two seconds behind the champions, Ukrainians Liudmyla Luzan and Iryna Fedoriv, with Canadians Zoe Wojtyk and Katie Vincent in second place.
Meanwhile, Laura Pedruelo from Zamora finished sixth in the K1 1,000-meter final, while David González from Pontevedra finished seventh in the VL1 200-meter paracanoe category. Also advancing to their respective finals were María Corbera in the C1 500; Pablo Crespo in the C1 1,000; and Roi Rodríguez in the K1 1,000.
