Instead, I spent part of the day dreaming up something to post here on the blog. Here's a little followup to yesterday's "photo feature" post. The U.S. team trials for wildwater took place this past weekend, and Jamie McEwan's son Devin has made the team for 2018. Devin has extensive slalom racing experience and raced C2 at the 2016 Olympics at Rio de Janiero. But just like his dad, he's doing some wildwater, too. Here is this year's U.S. wildwater team as reported by Jeff Owen of the USA Wildwater Committee:
Selected to represent the USA at the World Championships in Muotathal, Switzerland, on the Muota River:
~C1 Man - Devin McEwan
~K1 Man - Chris Hipgrave
~K1 Man - Cameron Thacker
~K1 Woman - Alessia Faverio
~K1 Woman - Marin Millar
~K1 Man - Chris Hipgrave
~K1 Man - Cameron Thacker
~K1 Woman - Alessia Faverio
~K1 Woman - Marin Millar
All of these athletes were also selected to represent the USA at the World Cups in Banja Luka and Celje, with the following additions:
K1 Woman - Joslin Coggan
K1 Woman - Lili Brandon
K1 Woman - Lili Brandon
Additionally we thank Chris Norbury for volunteering to be the USA Team Manager.
Long-time readers of this blog might also recognize the name Chris Hipgrave, a visitor to Memphis for many Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Races over the years.
What exactly is wildwater, you ask? "Wildwater" is downriver racing through whitewater rapids. Like I mentioned yesterday, it was partnered with whitewater slalom for decades much like downhill skiing is partnered with the various forms of slalom skiing. But now that slalom is an Olympic sport and wildwater isn't, wildwater is laboring to get by on its own. Few athletes compete in both disciplines these days.
That's a shame, because I believe slalom and wildwater are a lot more similar than many people realize. Sure, the boats are very different: wildwater boats put a premium on forward speed while slalom boats sacrifice forward speed for greater turning ability. But one skill is absolutely crucial for success in either discipline: boat positioning.
When you're trying to get down a slalom or wildwater course as quickly as possible, you want as many of your strokes as possible to be forward strokes, or at least strokes that propel the boat forward in some way while also effecting some necessary change in direction. You want to avoid strokes that slow the boat down, like stern rudders and (especially!) back strokes. A so-called "perfect run" would be one in which you do nothing but forward strokes, using the river's features (waves, holes, eddies, oblique currents) in combination with leans and body English to do all the steering.
To make sure you're doing mostly forward strokes, it's very important that, at every instant during your race run, your boat is in the right place and pointed the right way to allow you to take a good, solid, maximum-blade-pressure forward stroke. This is what whitewater racers mean when they talk about "boat positioning," and no, it is not easy. It requires not only a considerable degree of skill, boat control, body control, and balance, but also an intimate familiarity with every aspect of the course. Accomplished racers spend hours studying the course from their boats and from the riverbank, and going over the course in their minds away from the river. This is quite a commitment of time in the case of wildwater racers, who have as much as several miles of river to learn.
During the years I spent trying to race slalom in the 1990s, I struggled mightily with boat positioning. Just gaining an appreciable intellectual understanding of it took me a few years (and I probably didn't help myself by living hundreds of miles from other racers and coaches). By the early 2000s I had definitely improved and was even winning some club-level races, whose courses are typically pretty easy and take place on non-threatening whitewater. But the big national-level races like the team trials always required more difficult moves on bigger water, and there my lack of athletic ability was laid bare for the world to see. I remember sneaking in a lot of rudder strokes and doing a lot of braces while my more gifted competitors powered through all the moves as if they were on flatwater.
Throughout that period, friends of mine would sometimes tell me "You ought to race wildwater! With your endurance background (I'd been a runner in high school and college) and your river-running experience you'd be a natural!"
Eventually I did enter some wildwater races, and I was not a natural. Endurance was never a problem, but just because I'd done plenty of river running didn't mean I was ready to get down a river fast. The main thing I struggled with was exactly the thing that had given me so much trouble in slalom: boat positioning.
One wildwater race I did was the 2000 nationals on the Kern River out in California. The course had several long flatwater sections, and those were no problem: I paddled through them as hard as I could, just like I do in the races I'm doing these days. It was in the rapids that I lost an absurd amount of time. The biggest rapid was a circuitous route through a jumble of rocks, and all I remember now, nearly two decades later, is all the big, fat, ugly back strokes I was doing to get myself through the rapid without wrecking my boat. Meanwhile, I guarantee you that the top racers were forward-paddling through that rapid as if they were on a lake. At every instant, their boats were positioned just right so that they didn't have to do any corrective strokes.
Nowadays I'm doing a different type of racing, and while I'm not world-class in it either, at least I'm demonstrating a bit more competence. Not coincidentally, boat positioning is not really a part of this type of racing. I've even got a rudder to do almost all the steering. There are technical challenges, to be sure: I keep working to make my next stroke the perfect forward stroke. But these challenges seem to fit my particular set of athletic gifts better.
Still, I think a lot about all that whitewater racing I did, and there's a lot I miss about it. I wasn't winning much--more often, I was fighting to avoid last place. But in a weird way, that was part of the allure. Over many years, toiling to get good at something that did not come naturally to me built profound self-confidence and a sense of who I am in this world. It reminds me of a slogan that was painted on the wall of the basketball locker room at a school where I once taught. It was a trite slogan, but hey, it didn't become overused by not having any truth to it: "Most players practice what they do best. Good players practice what they do worst."
I'll leave you with an example of good boat positioning in wildwater racing. Vladi Panato of Italy was perhaps the greatest wildwater C1 racer ever. The video below presents a retrospective of his career. Except on one very technical boulder-strewn course that required some extreme turns, you will not see Mr. Panato switch paddling sides or take any strokes across the bow. He does all his steering by leaning the boat and by positioning it so that the whitewater features turn the boat for him. I am in awe every time I watch this footage.
Vladi Panato: Il Mito (The Legend) from WildWater TV Italia www.wwtv.it on Vimeo.
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