I'm pleased to discover that NBC is posting some video footage that even a non-cable-subscriber like me is allowed to watch. Among it is some highlights of the four U.S. slalom boats:
Casey Eichfeld, men's single canoe (C1)
Scott Parsons, men's kayak (K1)
Eric Hurd and Jeff Larimer, men's double canoe
Caroline Queen, women's kayak (K1W)
I really feel bad for Scott Parsons. He was eliminated from the qualification round in much the same way that he was in 2008. In both cases, he was under some pressure to turn in a fast time to make sure he was among the fifteen who would move on, and in both cases, attempting to shave an extra fraction of a second, he cut a move too tight and failed to get all of his head in the gate. At least from the camera angles shown in NBC's footage, it looks like he did get enough of his head in the gate for a correct negotiation, but the explanation I've heard is that his head and his boat were not in the gate at the same time.
Parsons is 33 years old, an age at which you might expect him to hang it up, but he has already announced publicly that he is going to stick with it. He retired after both the '04 and '08 Olympics, only to realize after a few months that he really missed "the life," and he says now that he's not going to make that mistake again.
Eichfeld seemed fairly solid during his runs, a couple of bad time errors contributing the most to his failure to advance. Watching his trouble in Gate 4, I totally felt his pain--I can't even tell you how many times over my slalom career I came into an upstream gate with the intention of snapping a nice, crisp pivot turn, only to stall my edge and sit there flailing around. Well, Eichfeld is only 22 years old and I expect he'll stick around for another quadrennium.
Same with Caroline Queen, who's only 20. All I really know to say about her performance is that she simply could use some more seasoning. A perfect contrast would be 44-year-old Štěpánka Hilgertová of the Czech Republic, whom I mentioned in this post back on June 15. She's competing in her sixth Olympics (which is to say, she's been in every Olympic slalom race in history except that first one at Augsburg in 1972), and in her qualifying heats she looked completely relaxed and in charge of her situation.
Eric Hurd is 26, and tomorrow happens to be Jeff Larimer's 31st birthday. So neither paddler is particularly old. But they've both been racing a long time now--they were both doing it back when I was still racing slalom. I don't know what their plans are, and they may not either right now.
Whatever the case, I think they all would do better in Rio four years from now if they were to make it there. Whether any of them can bring home a medal is a question that just can't be answered right now. But I will say this: the greatest slalom paddlers the U.S. has ever had have all been unorthodox thinkers in some way. Before 1979, the U.S. had never won a medal in the slalom world championships. Then came a group of young racers from the D.C. area, led by Jon Lugbill and Cathy and Davey Hearn, who dominated the C-boat and women's kayak classes for the next decade. They did so by re-inventing the sport itself, developing new boat designs and radical new techniques, and the rest of the world suddenly found itself playing catch-up. Then, from the late 80s through the 90s, Scott Shipley and Rich Weiss ended generations of U.S. frustration in men's kayak by challenging the attitude that they should be copying what Lugbill and the Hearns were doing and experimenting with new technical ideas of their own.
I think this spirit of innovation is a big reason the U.S. has managed a modicum of success in a sport that has far less government support here than in nations like France and Germany. So, in the unlikely event that a U.S. Olympic hopeful for 2016 reads this blog, here's my advice: Look for ways to improve upon the conventional wisdom. I don't know what they are myself--I spent my career just trying to make all the gates on national-level courses--but I hope that anybody smart enough to be interested in whitewater slalom in the first place will be smart enough at least to scratch the surface of new ideas.
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