GG Osmonova

Gulnara Osmonova ran her first rapid at nineteen, the only woman on a Soviet-era expedition raft, and has guided the Naryn's white water for two decades since. She trains the young guides now and fails half of them for hesitating. Her husband runs the base-camp kitchen and their daughters can read water better than road signs. Off the water she turns up immaculate, and the distance between the woman in the drysuit and the woman who walks into the room afterwards is one she enjoys keeping wide. She plays the way she enters a rapid: line chosen, fully committed, because halfway through is the one place you cannot change your mind. The same impatience that fails her trainees will not let her sit through somebody else's long think, so if you take your time over a move she will fill the silence for you. She plays almost entirely online, in the evenings from camp, and the format she keeps going back to is the chouette, because it is the only one with enough people talking at once to hold her attention.