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Kayak slalom with two thumbs: hold both paddles to run straight, one to carve. Same river every run, so the stopwatch is honest.
The left and right halves of the river are your two paddles. Hold both and the kayak runs straight and fast; hold only one and it carves towards the opposite side while still moving forward. Letting go lets the current take you.
The water runs fastest down the middle of the channel and is almost still at the banks, so the fast line and the safe line are rarely the same. Riding the centre is quick but leaves you little time to line up.
Twelve gates must be taken in order. Ten are ordinary downstream gates, drawn in green. Two are upstream gates, drawn in orange: you have to slip past them, turn the boat around and come back up through them against the flow before carrying on.
Brushing a pole adds two seconds and missing a gate adds ten, both on top of your running time. The river, the current and the gates are identical on every single run, so nothing is left to luck and the stopwatch is the whole story.
Steer with short taps of one paddle, not long holds. The kayak keeps turning after you let go, so a half second of one side is usually a whole gate's worth of correction. Beginners hold one paddle until the boat points at the gate, by which time it is already swinging past it.
Cross the current early, not late. Because the flow is fast in the middle and dead at the banks, a boat crossing the channel gets swept downstream while it travels sideways. Start moving towards the next gate's side as soon as the previous one is behind you, and you will arrive lined up instead of arriving fast and sideways.
For the two orange upstream gates, use the slack water. Paddling straight back up the middle means fighting the fastest part of the river; slide to the nearer bank where the current is almost nothing, climb there, and cross into the gate from the side. That is how real slalom paddlers do it and it saves several seconds here.
A missed gate costs ten seconds and a pole only two, so when you are half a boat length off line, take the brush rather than the miss. But do the arithmetic the other way at the last two gates: with the finish close, a clean miss sometimes costs less than the time you would spend turning around, and the run always ends — every gate also has a fourteen second limit of its own.