This article appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times the day after a 2003 race called The French Broad Paddle Challenge, which has since morphed into a two-day event called the French Broad Classique.
Lecky Haller, a Maryland native who now makes his home in Asheville, North Carolina, is one of the greatest canoe-kayak athletes the U.S. has ever had. He and his brother Fritz won the 1983 world championship in whitewater slalom double canoe; he teamed up with Jamie McEwan to finish a split-second out of the medals in the 1992 Olympic C2 slalom competition; and he made another Olympic team, in 2000, with Matt Taylor as a C2 slalom partner.
Because of all that and more, I've always been a bit embarrassed by this article because it leads the reader to believe that I am an athlete of the same caliber as Lecky. It also points out some ways in which our sport is not so easy to understand for people who are not fully immersed in it.
The article fails to mention that Lecky and I were competing in different boat classes, and therefore not really competing against each other: Lecky, ever the die-hard canoeist, was paddling a USCA-style marathon single canoe (C1), and he was in fact the fastest paddler on the river in that class that day. I, meanwhile, was in a single kayak (K1). The most obvious difference between these two boats is that a canoeist uses a single-bladed paddle while a kayaker uses a paddle with two blades, and that alone gives the kayaker a significant speed advantage. Even so, I knew better than to ignore Lecky once the gun went off: I've actually been beaten in my kayak by several top C1 paddlers (I've written on that topic here), and I was not at all certain that an athlete as good as Lecky wouldn't get the better of me. Even though, as it turned out, he didn't, I was nevertheless one of only three kayakers he didn't beat.
If I had been paddling the same kind of boat Lecky was in, I'm fairly certain he would have beaten me easily. What's more, paddling a marathon canoe is not even what Lecky does best: his greatest gift, the gift that carried him to a world title and two Olympic teams, is paddling in the stern of a whitewater C2. So hyping the presence of this particular Olympian in a sixteen-mile race down a mostly-flat section of the French Broad River is like hyping the presence of an Olympic diver in an open-water swim competition.
And so, I sort of cringed when the writer stated that I'd come to take "a shot at Haller's head" when in fact Lecky was easily the best athlete on the river. For his part, Lecky just laughed about it--on top of everything else, he's an exceptionally nice, down-to-Earth guy. I saw him a month or so after this article ran and he teasingly called me "Champ."
A broader issue raised by this article is that the casual observer is easily confused by the fact that all vessels in our sport are not created equal. More than once, regarding a race in which some great canoeist has competed, I've had to answer the question, "If that guy is such a big deal, how come he wasn't the fastest?" I sometimes wonder whether canoeists like having kayakers in the same races as they, since in most cases it means a canoeist won't be the first across the finish line.
This is probably one of the reasons our sport never has achieved the broader popularity of, say, snow-skiing: in skiing, every athlete competes on two skis, without the confusing division into classes that paddling has.
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