Time for some Olympic slalom

Canoe and kayak competition for the 2012 Olympic Games begins tomorrow with whitewater slalom racing at Lee Valley White Water Centre in Hertfordshire. This will be the seventh time that slalom has been an Olympic medal sport.  The first Olympic slalom took place on the Eiskanal ("Ice Canal") in Augsburg, Germany, as a part of the 1972 Munich Games.  Then slalom disappeared from the Olympic programme, apparently because the organizers of the 1976 Montreal Games didn't want to fool with it.  But it came back for the 1992 Games at Barcelona, on an artificial course at La Seu d'Urgell.  It has been part of every Olympics since.

Slalomists race one boat at a time through a course of 18-25 gates that hang over a section of whitewater river.  A traditional gate consists of two pieces of PVC pipe four to five feet apart, and the paddler's head and part of his boat must pass between these poles for a correct negotiation of the gate.  Since the 2008 Olympics, the ICF has made a change to this tradition by incorporating single-pole gates into courses; racers must simply pass such poles to the right or to the left, as specified before the competition.

Some of the gates (those with green and white poles) must be run in a "downstream" direction, while for others (whose poles are red and white) the paddler must drop below the gate and paddle upstream through (or past) it.  Once a racer has run the course, his score is the number of seconds that elapsed between his start and his finish, plus penalties--one gets a two-second penalty for touching a pole as he negotiates a gate, and a 50-second penalty for missing the gate entirely.  At the world-class level, a single two-second penalty is often enough to bump a racer out of the medals.

A typical slalom course run at the world-class level takes about 100 seconds--roughly the same length of time it takes a world-class 800-meter runner to cover his distance.  So the cardiovascular fitness of a slalom racer is not much different from that of a middle-distance runner.  But slalom is a much more technical sport than running, and the racers must devote a large chunk of their training time to practicing strokes and techniques in the gates.  Because technique is so important in slalom, most athletes do their physical work concurrently with their technical work.  Slalom also presents other challenges that would simply boggle a runner's mind.  The gate positions are a secret until the eve of the race, and no two competitions feature exactly the same course.  No practice runs are allowed.  So the racers must practice a broad variety of gate combinations in the hope of simulating the moves they must perform on race day.  They also spend a lot of time just thinking about moves--a practice known as mental rehearsal, or visualization.  Each slalom Olympian has had a chance to train on the water at Lee Valley, and has gone over the canal in his mind thousands of times, committing every wave, hole, and eddy to a mental video tape.  When the gate positions are revealed for the Games, each athlete will imagine his view from the boat of each gate as he paddles through it.

Tomorrow, it will be the qualifying heats for men's single canoe (C1) and men's kayak (K1).  Each paddler will get two runs on the course, and the better of his two scores will determine his position in the standings.  Sixteen athletes are entered in the C1 class, and the top twelve performers in the qualifying heats will advance to the semifinal round on Tuesday.  In K1, the field of 21 will be pared down to fifteen, and those fifteen will race in the semis on Wednesday.

The women's kayak (K1W) and men's single canoe (C2) classes will have their qualifying heats on Monday.  Twenty-one K1Ws will be reduced to fifteen, while twelve C2s will be trimmed to ten.  Both classes will have their semifinals on Thursday.

Artificial courses have been the rule for Olympic slaloms.  The only Olympic slalom ever held on a natural river was the one in 1996, held about two hours outside Atlanta on Tennessee's Ocoee River, a dam-controlled river whose bed had undergone extensive alteration for the event.  As nice as it is to race slalom on a natural river, the typical Olympic city does not have one nearby that meets all specifications for a world-class competition.  So the engineers go to work.  The Eiskanal at Augsburg was an existing channel that diverted water from a river to a nearby industrial district, and construction crews installed the obstacles to create waves, eddies, and holes.  The other Olympic venues--La Seu d'Urgell, Penrith (outside Sydney), Athens, and Beijing--are concrete courses built from scratch that use powerful pumps to recirculate water from the bottom back to the top.  The Athens venue, located on the property of the old airport at Helleniko, was unique in that it used saltwater pumped from the Saronic Gulf.

A significant issue for any Olympic city is what happens to all those venues once the Games are over, and I'm happy to say that the courses at Augsburg, La Seu, and Penrith are still regular stops on the international slalom circuit.  The course on the Ocoee River, sadly, sits dewatered and unused except for a handful of days each summer when water is released for commercial rafting.  I'm not sure about the status of the Athens and Beijing venues at this time.  As whitewater slalom has a long tradition in Great Britain, I am hopeful that the Lee Valley Whitewater Centre will continue to be used for training, racing, and recreation for many years to come.  A description of the venue is available here.

I'd been agonizing over whether I should attempt to make any medal predictions, or even mention athletes to watch, as I would very likely end up looking stupid.  Fortunately, Jamie McEwan has gallantly assumed that risk in this article for Canoe and Kayak magazine.  Jamie won the bronze medal in C1 at that first Olympic slalom on the Eiskanal in '72, and is anything but stupid when it comes to talking about the sport.