儿童素描图片大全简单:希望大家提供一些关于皮划艇的英文介绍

Canoe / Kayak
Olympic sport since 1936

ABOUT
The history of the canoe and kayak has been traced back thousands of years to when natives used these craft to hunt, fish and travel. Canoes were used mainly by the native North and South American Indians along with the Polynesian islanders of the Pacific. They were propelled through the water by single-bladed paddles usually made from wood.

The earliest known archaeological evidence of a canoe was unearthed at the tomb of a Sumerian king near the Euphrates River. This relic is estimated to be around 6000 years old. The counterpart of the American Indian canoe is the kayak which was introduced by Eskimos many years ago. These people inhabited the land to the far north of the American continent and Greenland.

History
Origins of International Canoe Sport

Where there is water, be it ocean, lake or river, there has been indigenous water craft, in most instances a canoe, defined as "a craft, sharp at both ends, propelled by human power with a paddle either single blade or double bladed where the paddler is facing the direction in which the craft is going". To indigenous people throughout the world, we owe the basic knowledge and skills associated with the design, production and utilization of the water craft we know by the name of canoe. They have been primitively and elegantly constructed, from 3 to over 30 meters in length, from logs, animal skins and tree bark and used for basic transportation, trade, and in some instances, for war. Sport is not associated with indigenous cultures; it is a recent product of 19th century industrial society, when an emerging middle class with wealth, sufficient to engage in leisure activities, sought out a variety of physical pastimes, which today might be referred to as recreation or when taken to an extreme, as sport.

Two basic canoes types were adopted by 19th century sportsmen: a covered, decked canoe propelled with a double bladed and an open canoe propelled with a single blade paddle. The modern decked canoe emerged about the lower Thames River in Britain in the late 1850's, early '60's. Its model was the decked canoe used by native peoples, from the Bering Sea across the Canadian Arctic to Greenland. In the language of the Canadian Inuit it was known as a "kayak" and that is what it is called throughout the industrialized world. The modern, decked canoe or kayak was popularized by John MacGregor, an intrepid Scottish barrister who had a wooden kayak built in 1865 which used a traditional double bladed paddle and a light "portable" mast and sail. A book of his adventures, "A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe" popularized the craft and the sport of Canoeing with 19th century sportsmen, who readily adopted the decked canoe for touring as well as for racing. And it was in North America that the modern decked sailing/paddling canoe was challenged by a more simple craft, an open canoe crafted from birch bark, white cedar, spruce root and gum conveniently located through-out the mixed forest regions of central and eastern Canada. Used by early explorers and settlers, it was the model used for the design of elegant log canoes which, in turn, became moulds for a more durable and rugged, wood plank canoe. By the 1870's these smooth-skinned craft were being turned out in numbers in boat building shops in the Peterborough region of central Canada. And they became the essential craft for anyone who wished to experience travel in the Canadian wilderness.

This is the craft that challenged the decked sailing/paddling canoe and by the 1890's virtually replaced the decked canoe in North America for both single blade and double blade paddling. The decked canoe survived in North America as a racing sailing canoe which few sportsmen could afford to build and fewer still could sail. The open canoe was exported to European centers, notably in Britain and France from which it spread throughout Europe, establishing a small niche for itself especially amongst touring canoeists. The open wood canoe was the craft that evolved into the sleek craft we know as the racing C-1. (C-1 refers to "Canadian Singles" after the country from which the craft originated. With the world wide adoption of the racing canoe, the "C-1" has more popularly come to stand for "Canoe Singles".) The primal nature of the practice of Canoeing, the image of this basic watercraft, virtually world wide, serves as a unifying symbol amongst cultures and nations whose peoples share a common experience over time as well as space. And it helps to explain the impressive expansion of the International Canoe Federation to over 100 countries within the span of 75 years.

国际皮划艇联合会
http://www.canoeicf.com/
http://www.olympic.org/uk/sports/programme/index_uk.asp?SportCode=CA