TASIADIS Sideris

General
OCCUPATION
He serves in the elite sports programme of the Bavarian police, where athletes receive up to eight months off per year to train and compete. (main-echo.de, 14 Feb 2020; kanu.de, 01 Mar 2019)

READING THE WATER
He learnt the sport on the rivers around Augsburg, Germany. "In the beginning I was scared. I did not want to go to training because the coach was planning to get me into the wild water very fast. I did not have much strength and skills and I was scared under the water, so I did not want to go to training. [But] you learn to read the water best when you make your way down natural rivers, not artificially built tracks like we have for our competitions. With natural rivers you always have to respect the water, because these are forces you cannot work against. I look at the water differently. I take a close look at how and where it flows, so that I can take advantage of it in the competition and be milliseconds faster than someone else." (Olympic YouTube channel, 02 Jan 2017)

GREEK ROOTS
His family has Greek origins, and when he was age five, his parents moved back to Greece. "My grandfather broke his leg back then and he couldn't manage to do the farming by himself, therefore it was clear to my parents that we had to go back to Greece to help." The family moved to Komara, Greece and stayed there until 2000. "In those five years, I did not speak any German, so I forgot the language altogether. You could notice that I was barely able to form a sentence, but now it's easier for me to speak German than Greek. If I would still be in the village my parents came from in Greece now, I would never have been so successful and gotten to know the sport." (Olympic YouTube channel, 02 Jan 2017, eu.greekreporter.com 01 Aug 2012)