BURNERS STORY
The Curious Kid
Sam Wilson
A paddler who kept asking what's possible, until curiosity eventually became a world record.
Curiosity doesn't always look loud. Sometimes it's the quiet kid at the side of the water wondering whether there might be another way.
Where it started
Sam remembers himself as pretty quiet when he first started coming to Burners.
But quiet didn't mean unambitious.
He was obsessed with big air loops — his one staple trick at the time — but underneath that was something much broader.
“I think I just wanted to learn it all.”
That curiosity hadn't started with kayaking. Sam had experienced something similar through kickboxing. He was smaller and less powerful than many of the people he trained alongside, so simply trying to overpower them wasn't going to work.
He had to find different ways to make things happen.
Over time, that way of thinking began to seep into everything else.
Keep falling differently
One of Sam's earliest breakthroughs came in a swimming-pool session.
He'd been desperate to learn a bow stall. Claro spent time helping him explore it and suddenly kayaking offered something beyond simply learning to roll.
“It was like, wow, this is new. I can finally do something that's interesting other than roll.”
The bow stall still took nearly a year.
But giving up never really entered the equation.
“I was just going to keep falling over until I fell in the right way.”
Years later, Luna loops presented the same sort of problem. They took what Sam describes as a “horrendous amount of time”.
His response was much the same.
Not stop trying.
Try it differently.
When curiosity meets performance
Years of experimenting eventually took Sam to the 2025 World Championships in Plattling.
The target was clear: break 3,000 points.
Between his second and third rides, we talked about simplifying what the next ride needed to be.
Forget the number.
Just demonstrate to the kids watching what squirt boating could be.
Something settled.
Sam went back onto the water and scored 3,200 points — a world record.
What he remembers isn't really the number.
“I just went and did kayaking. It wasn't anything else other than just kayaking.”
Perhaps that's the interesting part.
After all the experimenting, questioning, failing, adapting and learning, the biggest performance arrived when everything became simple again.