BURNERS STORY
He Wouldn't Quit
Tim Rees
From a committed young paddler to a two-time Junior World Champion. The medals came long after the habits.
Long before there were medals, there was a young paddler who just kept turning up and doing the work.
Where it started
Tim was 12 when he first came into the Burners environment.
He lived near Ulm in Germany and had discovered freestyle with his brother. Through Quim Fontaine, then Men's World Champion, his family found their way to the Burners camps.
Tim arrived as a young paddler with plenty to learn.
What began to distinguish him wasn't a medal or an extraordinary result.
It was that he kept doing the work.
The exercises went home with him. Sessions were recorded. Video came back for review. Feedback went into the next session.
Then he did it again.
When nobody was watching
Progress isn't always exciting.
During Covid, competitions disappeared, travel stopped and much of the normal structure around paddling vanished.
Tim kept training.
When competition returned, things didn't immediately go perfectly either. There were setbacks and performances that created more questions than answers.
We'd debrief them, work out what could be learned and move forward.
At his first major international competition, the 2021 European Championships, Tim finished second. By the 2022 World Championships in Nottingham, years of those small pieces of work had accumulated.
Tim became Junior World Champion.
The habits travelled
A year later the challenge changed again.
The 2023 World Championships were in Columbus, USA, on a wave — very different from the features Tim was accustomed to paddling.
He had to adapt.
And he did.
Tim won his second consecutive Junior World Championship.
But perhaps the more interesting part came afterwards.
Education became more important and paddling moved further into the background. When we reconnected for the 2024 European Championships in Graz, my job wasn't to teach Tim everything again.
Much of it was already there.
He won the European title.
By the 2025 World Championships, I was no longer coaching Tim directly. He stepped from junior into the senior men's category and won silver, drawing increasingly on his own experience and the things he'd built over years.