Fake it till you make it

Ageism is a fact of life in the work place. Once you get past 50 it’s way more difficult to find a job than it was at, say, 30. This isn’t necessarily because employers don’t like older people (though evidence suggests they don’t, they’re generally more expensive) but because there are also fewer senior roles around and most of the so-called ‘grey beards’ looking for work tend to have climbed some way up the corporate ladder. But young applicants present problems all of their own.

A friend of mine who works in HR tells me, however, she is fast becoming disillusioned with some young job-seekers she comes across. Why? Because there is so much embroidery, exaggeration and outright dishonesty in some of their CVs.

Continue reading

Row, row, row your, er, canoe

Canoeists everywhere get frustrated when their sport’s described as ‘rowing’.

It seems only yesterday that we were busily collecting entries for ‘hapless sub-editor of the year’ and ‘clueless sports reporter of the Olympic Games’ in which our gallant entrants got to ask Britain’s top kayakers how long they’d been rowing, how much their oars cost and topped their journalistic credentials off with such classic headlines as “Oar-some duo rowing for Gold!!!!!
Continue reading

Can sports magazines survive?

Another day, another paddling magazine. At least, that’s how it felt in late 2012 when two titles called “The Paddler” emerged and I spent hours a week indulging a shameful habit on the internet. That’s, er, scouring the web for the plethora of canoe-related e-zines out there, in case you were wondering.

I glimpsed what might have been signs of new thinking at the BCU when I heard that the publishing of Canoe Focus was being contracted out. I wondered if this would be the governing body’s ‘moment’ when it went digital. But, no, it turned out to be just a bit of a redesign and a ‘new’ magazine which, to my untutored eye, looked pretty similar to what went before – and which I never really bothered to read either. Continue reading

Une Histoire D’Equilibre

French three-time Olympic gold medalist Tony Estanguet has published his autobiography. The book, “A story of balance” (or, more accurately, “Une Histoire D’Equilibre”) is an account of his life in canoeing, how he got to the top and how he survived there.

From the early days watching his father Henri and older brother Patrice winning, respectively, world championship titles and an Olympic bronze medal Estanguet tracks his own progress towards success at two Olympic Games (gold in Sydney and Athens), discusses how he felt about disappointment in Beijing (9th place) and how he bounced back to win gold in London. Continue reading

Doping: a journalistic failure?

So why did the media apparently fail to uncover the doping scandal in cycling? Sunday Times journalist David Walsh, who followed Lance Armstrong closely for years and was the subject of a libel case as a result, thinks it was for two reasons:

Firstly, coverage was heavily influenced by the cyclist’s battle with cancer. Secondly, journalists weren’t sufficiently detached – they’d become “fans with typewriters”. Continue reading