Water is entirely unpredictable. 

As a result, unlike many other individual sports like gymnastics or track and field, canoe slalom paddlers can't practice a race over and over again. Even if the blocks and other obstacles stay the same, the water will change the nature of the route. 

On the latest daily episode of The Podium: An NBC Olympic and Paralympic podcast, titled "Day 11: Going with the Flow," Evy Leibfarth, the 20-year-old American paddler who won bronze in the women's canoe slalom event in Paris, describes just how crucial it is to ebb and flow with the water surrounding the shell.

"Kayaking — it's a sport about having Plan As and Bs and Cs and Ds and Es, because no one's going to have the perfect run," Leibfarth said. "I think it's impossible to have a perfect run because the water is changing so much and the gates are in really hard places usually. The person that wins is the person that goes to those next plans as fast as they can. If something's not working, just go to the next plan.

Hear all of that and more on the eleventh daily episode of The Podium.

New episodes of The Podium will be released every day during the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. 

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