Kayak Singles, 500 metres, Men

The field for the men’s K-1 500 at the 1992 Summer Olympics was fairly open, as results in the event at the World Championships had been fairly inconsistent. The last three World Champions had been Martin Hunter of Australia, Sergey Kalesnik of the Soviet Union (now competing for the Unified Team), and Renn Crichlow of Canada, with Hunter being the only one of the three to have medaled more than once in the event (he was third in 1990). Hungary’s Zsolt Gyulay was the defending Olympic champion and had earned bronze at the 1991 World Championships, while Cuba’s Angel Pérez was the most recent Pan American champion.

Crichlow and Kalesnik won their heats, the latter doing so in Olympic record time and helping consign Hunter to the repêchage, where he was eliminated. Gyulay, meanwhile, was sent to the repêchage by Finland’s Mikko Kolehmainen, although he survived to the semi-finals. The other heat was taken by Roberto Liberato of Switzerland, while the repêchage was notable for the performance of Norway’s Knut Holmann, the reigning K-1 1000 World Champion, who bested Kalesnik’s record by 0.54 seconds. Fortunes changed in the semi-finals, where Crichlow was eliminated in a heat won by Norman Bellingham of the United States, a 1988 Olympic champion in the K-2 1000, while Kolehmainen took the other. The final was a thrilling race where Kolehmainen, Gyulay, Holmann, Bellingham, and Kalesnik all crossed the finish line in that order within 0.56 seconds of the Finn’s Olympic record-setting time. Although it would be Kolehmainen’s only Olympic medal, Gyulay would go on to be runner-up in the K-4 1000, while Holmann became Olympic champion in the K-1 1000.