Emanuel Silva

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Emanuel Silva (born 4 December 1985 in Braga) is a Portuguese flatwater canoer. A finalist at the 2004 Olympics, he is Portugal's most successful kayak sprinter since the 1980's.

Despite training with very limited resources, Silva became outright Portuguese individual champion over three distances (500m, 1000m and 10,000m) at the age of just sixteen.

In 2003 he starred at the world junior championships in Komatsu, Japan, winning the K1 500m gold medal and silver in the K1 1000m. He then competed in his first senior world championships, in Gainesville, USA, placing a highly-creditable sixteenth in the K1 1000m.

In 2004 he reached his first senior final, finishing in seventh place at the European championships in Poznań, Poland. Still only eighteen years old, and technically a junior, he was the second-youngest competitor in the blue riband K1 1000m event at the Athens Olympics and exceeded expectations by reaching the final. There he finished in seventh place in a time of 3:33.862.

He followed up his Athens success by winning the 2005 European Under-23 Championship K1 1000m final in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Later in the season he won the first senior medal of his career, the K1 1000m bronze at the European Champioships in Poznań, Poland.

In 2006 he retained his European under-23 title at Schinias, Greece. In senior competition he achieved his best-ever world championship placing, seventh, at the World Championships in Szeged.

Silva is now a member of the Clube Náutico de Prado in Portugal.