Korda England Carp team’s dismay at the World Carp Angling Championships bait scandal

The 14th FIPSed World Carp Angling Championships were held at Lac Corbu in Romania between the 27th and 30th September 2012, but were marred by the use of a venue where the fish had been fed on a single soluble bait for 5 months.  Because this information was only available to a few countries, those teams had a very significant advantage.  Despite the Korda England Carp team working together really well for months before the event, with the fantastic support of their new sponsor Korda, there was no way they could win using a different bait.

Ian Huntington, Korda England Carp Team Manager said, “Despite putting in a tremendous amount of work this year leading up to the event the outcome turned out to be never in any doubt from the host nation’s point of view.  The key to the match and what we did not know was the carp had been fed with one single type of soluble bait, since they were stocked into Lac Corbu in May 2012.  Consequently countries that had been and practised a number of times at the venue were aware of this and managed to get local bait to enable them to compete.  The neighbouring Bulgarians commissioned their own bait based on what had been fed to the fish.  Portugal and Serbia had contacts in Romania who provided bait.  We only discovered after the match that the fish were fed daily throughout the summer by boat on the Romanian bait from fixed lines parallel with the bank.”

“It is obvious that any team fishing with the particular type of  bait would do well and the rest would really struggle to get a bite.  Within two hours of the match starting we were asking ourselves questions about the bait.  We later found out from the South African team and the French team consultant Ronnie De-Groot that they had also brought different English boilies from two other leading manufactures, most of which stayed on the pallets and was not used at all in the case of South Africa.  That’s 1.5 tonnes of boilies or £10,000 worth of bait wasted.”

Romania dominated the event, comfortably winning two out of the three sections and with a poor draw in section B, Romania still finished fourth in this section for a total of six points to take the team gold with a grand total of 1704.08 kg.  They also won the individual gold medal with 763.78kg.  Bulgaria finished second with seven points and the team silver medal with a total of 1362.92 kg.  Serbia finished third with nine points and took the bronze medal with a total of 1238.16 kg.  England finished a very disappointing 18th with a total of 373.44 kg.

Ian Huntingdon continued, “Hard lessons have been learnt and it has been a very difficult experience to pick the team and ourselves up after this event.  We are extremely disappointed that the water was fed with a single bait.  While this is not strictly against the rules, and the Romanians freely admitted to doing it we feel that there is a morale issue here, and question whether this practice is in the spirit of fair play.  I have already spoken to Dick Clegg about this and he is going to take the matter up with FIPSed at this year’s November meeting in Italy.  While we appreciate the Lac Corbu is unique because its fish stock are brand new, thus making this selective feeding of the water more possible, other host nations might be tempted to follow suit in future, which could lead to a potential break up of the competition.”

“On behalf of the team I would like to thank the team sponsors Korda for all their help and fantastic support throughout the year.”