Another thought about the worlds

I'm still thinking about the slalom worlds last weekend.  Wow... I can't get over how good those paddlers are.

For most of the history of the world championships, a racer was allowed to participate in only one class.  Then, after the 2008 Olympics, I think, the ICF began to allow each athlete to race in two classes, if he wanted to.  One of the obvious results is that some C1 racers began to race in the C2 class as well.  One high-profile example was David Florence of Great Britain: already a top C1 racer (Olympic silver medal in 2008), Florence entered the 2012 Games in both C1 and C2 and came away with the silver medal in the latter class.

More recently, K1 paddlers have begun to take up the single blade.  When many-time worlds medalist kayak racer Fabien Lefevre moved from France to the United States and began competing for the U.S. team in 2013, he did so in both K1 and C1.  During the 2013 and 2014 seasons, it appeared that K1 would remain his stronger suit, but at the Deep Creek worlds this past weekend, he pulled off a stunning victory in canoe.

Meanwhile, on the women's side, Australian Jessica Fox, both of whose parents were world-champion kayakers, took up both K1 and C1 as women's C1 was added to the world championships programme in 2009.  She was soon among the world's best in both classes, and at Deep Creek she became world champion in both.

One of the interesting things about having all these kayakers coming over to C1 is that they have no problem switching sides with the paddle in C1.  In their elite-level kayaking experience they have become ambidextrous, and in C1 they can paddle on the right for moves that favor righties and on the left for moves that favor lefties (or, as Ron Lugbill suggests in this blog post about Lefevre's winning runs at Deep Creek, they can burn one set of muscles on the first half of a course and then run the second half with fresh muscles).

As I watched all this side-switching going on last weekend, it seemed to me that what was old was new again.  By the time I started whitewater canoeing at summer camp in the early 1980s, switching sides was considered unnecessary and was even frowned upon.  At that time river-running was still heavily influenced by slalom racing, and the U.S. C1 paddlers who had just begun their decade of world dominance had developed very powerful strokes across the bow that were just as effective, they claimed, as their "on-side" strokes.  Not wanting to be seen as a rube, I worked to develop good cross-strokes of my own.  My tandem canoe partner that first summer was a bossy sort who insisted he was a righty and I must paddle on the left, so over the next few years I paddled on that side and as a result, to this day I have much less coordination on my right side than on my left.  Back then I didn't care, though, because I eventually had good, solid offside strokes and in my fantasies the kayakers on the river "oohed" and "aahed" whenever I pulled off an impressive offside move.

But now, all of a sudden, some of the best C1 paddlers in the world are switching, and nobody dares call them rubes.  Switching is not only acceptable, but maybe even cool.  And it's making me wonder what other relics we might bring back.

Back in the "salad days" of whitewater racing in the 1960s and 70s, it was not uncommon for racers to compete in both slalom and wildwater from the recreational level to the world class level.  The world championships for both were held together at the same site until about 1993.  But with slalom's return to the Olympics in 1992, specialization became the rule.  Soon virtually no slalom racers were doing wildwater anymore, and in the mid-90s the wildwater worlds went to an even-numbered-year schedule and was completely separated from the slalom worlds.

Every time I watch the winter Olympics on TV, I am struck by the format of alpine skiing: there is the downhill event, the slalom event, the giant slalom event, and the "Super G" event, whatever that is, and each racer typically does them all.  I think it would be very cool if the summer games had a similar format for canoe and kayak racing--slalom, downriver, some kind of giant slalom, with each paddler doing them all.  The specialization urge has already been relaxed somewhat now that each racer is allowed to race in two classes; why not take that next step?

Alas, the summer games is already cluttered with too many sports, and canoe and kayak racing does not seem to resonate with a big enough TV audience.  In fact, I fear that slalom may not survive on the Olympic programme for the long haul.  But hey... every reality starts with a dream.  Maybe if (when?) slalom is dropped from the Olympics we can re-invent whitewater racing at the world championship level with this multi-event format.