Kayaker Stephenie Chen’s art of the finish: Pushing past the pain (2024)

The only thing Stephenie Chen is sure of, the only guarantee of her hurtling, relentless K1 500m race, is that she’s going to be wrecked by the finish.

As her race, which travels down a straight watery line, reaches its final section, and she has to hold her intensity and build on it, she knows what awaits her.

Pain.

“Everybody knows it’s coming and you have to embrace it.”

But what precisely is hurting? Arms, shoulders, back, legs, lungs?

“Everything,” she laughs.

By 200m she’s hurting but there’s still 300m to go in her kayaking event. She remembers little details to focus on, keeps track of her splits in her head, tries to ensure her technique stays pure. As if all this will distract from the effort, the burn, the crying muscles, leaving a body so empty at the finish that she has the most savage of descriptions for it.

In the end, what does it feel like?

On the phone she pauses.

“It feels like sh***ing your pants. I don’t know any other way to describe it.”

Athletes don’t come to a Games to start, but to finish. The finish is how they’re judged. It’s how the world sees them and how they see themselves. What measure of heart, endurance, doggedness, focus did they bring. Did they finish well? Did they finish at all?

In the marathon at the 1968 Olympics, Tanzania’s John Stephen Akhwari fell during the race. He reached the tape after night had fallen, his bloody knee wrapped in bandages, but he would say, “My country did not send me 5,000 miles away to start the race. They sent me 5,000 miles to finish it.”

The finish of the K1 500 is just short of two minutes and half a kilometre away. But to understand the finish you have to go back to the start. This is a sprint of stages, which begins with a first 50m where the Asian Games silver medallist starts like she’s in hot pursuit of a river pirate.

“I chase it out as hard as I can,” says Chen.

Shoulders dip, paddle whirls.

She has to carry this “aggression to the 70-80m mark” which is when her stroke changes. It becomes longer and more powerful, or what she describes as “keeping the speed up but bringing the (stroke) rate down”.

What she’s searching for is rhythm, the sort of easy power which comes from an athlete who finds a rare state of flow.

At the 250m mark she “doubles down”, tightening her focus, the pain rising yet ensuring that she “maintains” power. Sport at its fundamental level isn’t sexy, instead it is a basic marriage of technique, discipline, consistency, efficiency.

“The person,” she says, “who wins makes the least mistakes.”

When the body tires, errors creep in as slyly as rain under the window. Sometimes her technique might go awry. Or her stroke gets too shallow. Or her body stops rotating. All this she must resist and yet at the same time she must not avoid risk. “Sometimes I am too conservative. Because I know I will die at the end, so I hold back at the start.”

As the sprint wears on, “composure” is what she says she seeks, this elusive mix of calm and control amid competitive chaos. Composure staves off panic. Composure allows her to function smoothly. Composure will bring what she needs towards the finish: power and speed.

The finish is coming and she knows this because all she’s looking at are the markers which line the course. 50m. 150m. 250m. 400m. The finish is why she trains six days a week, bench-presses 90kg and does chin-ups with 40kg around her waist. It is not just strength she is building but familiarising herself with pain.

Her race is so tight that timers are set to thousandths of a second. The end is marked by two flags and when she gets there Chen is often bent over in exhaustion.

“I am very glad I am done. That it’s over.”

The race is finished. So is she.