Missing Dusi trophy discovered

The trophy was reunited with Ian Player, the inaugural winner and founder of the Dusi Canoe Marathon.

The 86-year-old environmentalist was delighted to get the trophy back. It was presented to the race by his father and his famous golfing brother Gary Player in 1953.

“This is a wonderful occasion,” Player said when he was handed the trophy at his Karkloof home this week.

“There is so much history wrapped up in the this trophy, and so many great personalities.”

The trophy, inscribed as the Player Canoe Endurance Championship, mysteriously disappeared in 1972, after which the race committee purchased a new trophy which has been awarded every year since then.

The original trophy was discovered in a dark corner of a storeroom during the recent move into the refurbished race offices at Natal Canoe Club’s home at Camps Drift.

Player’s eyes lit up when he read the 1954 inscription on the trophy that showed that he and his partner Fred Schmidt shared the title with Ernie Pearce and Bob Templeton.

The race committee will have the original trophy cleaned and inscribed with the names of all the winners since its disappearance in 1972.

“We genuinely have no idea where the trophy went,” said race committee head Brett Austen-Smith.

“It was won by the Van Riet brothers from the Cape in 1972 and then literally vanished. Similarly we don’t really know how it came to find its way back to the old store room that we were repacking. We were actually looking for a larger, more appropriate trophy for the women’s winners when we discovered the original Players Family trophy in the storeroom.”

The Dusi Canoe Marathon 2014 starts in Pietermaritzburg on Thursday February 13 and ends in Durban on Saturday February 15.

– Sapa