It's an Olympic year

The Games of the 31st Olympiad will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, later this year.  Canoe and kayak racing will be included.

Mind you, not all canoe and kayak racing will be included.  There will be no surf ski or outrigger racing; no wildwater; no flatwater marathon; no extreme creek racing.  Just one discipline for whitewater (slalom) and one for flatwater (sprint).

But anytime I'm tempted to get my undies in a bunch over that, I just remind myself that the same is true for most other sports.  For instance, the bicycle disciplines of mountain biking, road racing, and velodrome events are all in the Olympics, but not cyclocross.  Wrestlers, weightlifters, and martial artists can probably all give you their lists of disciplines within their sports that are not on the Olympic programme.  And many believe that's not the worst thing: 1992 whitewater slalom Olympian Eric Jackson makes some interesting points about that in this interview.

But the Olympics are a big deal, if nothing else because they're on TV all over the world and give the broader public a brief glimpse at sports like ours that carry on in total obscurity most of the time.  Here in the U.S., the process of selecting the athletes that will paddle in Rio has moved into high gear.  Over the weekend there was a slalom competition in Charlotte at which two people were named to the U.S. Team.

Michal Smolen of Gastonia, North Carolina, claimed the U.S. Olympic Team spot in men's kayak (K1).  Michal is a native of Poland but has lived most of his life in the U.S.: his dad, Rafal Smolen, moved here to begin a career in coaching the sport in the late 1990s.  Michal has been a member of the U.S. national team for the last few years and just recently got his U.S. citizenship in order to make himself eligible for Olympic competition.

Casey Eichfeld of Mount Holly, North Carolina, punched his ticket to Rio in the men's single canoe (C1) class.  Casey grew up in Pennsylvania and was just starting to show up at races in the 1990s as my own slalom career was winding down, and I remember watching the nine- or ten-year-old kid and thinking that if he stuck with it he might be very good.  That, of course, was a big "if"--many fabulously talented kids have come and gone in this sport without going "the distance" to international prominence.  But lo and behold, Casey has stuck with it, and it seems that especially in these last few years he's really stepped up his game and made himself one of the top racers in the world in slalom C1.

Yet to be determined are the U.S. Olympians in the women's kayak class (K1W) and the men's double canoe class (C2).  The selection process will continue on May 7-8 with a competition on the new course at Oklahoma City.

I believe two questions are obvious at this point: Why have Olympic Team berths been decided in two classes, but not all four? and, Why are there no canoe classes for women?

I'll field the second question first: I can't say I know the origin of this issue.  Maybe there were very few women racing slalom in canoes when the world championships debuted in 1949; maybe the cigar smoking good ol' boys in the International Canoe Federation considered women too "dainty" for the manly business of canoeing... I don't really know.  But that's how things were for the first six decades of the ICF world championships, and plenty of people were unhappy about it and lobbied for change.  I think it finally took an ultimatum for greater gender equity from the International Olympic Committee to get the ICF to do something about it.  A women's single canoe class (C1W) was added to the world championships in about 2010 with the intention of adding it to the Olympics a quadrennium or two later.  Plans are now set for C1W to make its Olympic debut in the 2020 Games at Tokyo.  Women's canoe classes also will debut in flatwater sprint racing, where they also had been absent.

There's no doubt that gender equity is important and necessary.  But I'm saddened by the cost of adding C1W to the Olympics.  The IOC is very stingy when it comes to the overall number of "fringe sport" athletes like paddlers that it will allow to participate in the Games, and to make room for C1W the ICF has had to remove C2, arguably the most interesting and beautiful class, from Olympic competition.

As for that first question above: athletes vie for selection to the U.S. Olympic Team by earning points in several events in the year prior to the Games.  One such event was the 2015 world championships at the Lee Valley White Water Centre outside London, and Michal Smolen and Casey Eichfeld were the only two U.S. athletes to earn points there.  Their performances were in fact quite magnificent: Smolen claimed the bronze medal in K1, while Eichfeld appeared on the verge of winning the C1 class until a tiny but devastating time error knocked him back to fourth place.

In any case, if Smolen finished third or better in Charlotte this past weekend, he would amass a point total that no other athlete would be able to surpass, and therefore clinch a spot on the Olympic Team. He won.  Eichfeld came to Charlotte needing to finish second or better; he also won.  No paddler in the other two classes has yet accumulated such an insurmountable lead in points, and so their competition will continue in Oklahoma City next month.

If you're still reading this post, then you know that Olympic selection is not the simplest thing to talk about, and I apologize for being so long-winded.  But there's one more part of the story I'll address, and it's a process that to me seems truly byzantine: how a nation qualifies spots in the Olympics.  As I mentioned above, the IOC allows only so many paddlers on the water in the Games, and each nation must demonstrate, in competitions like the world championships, that it has paddlers who can compete at the world-class level in order to be awarded berths in the competition.  A further complication is that the IOC wants the berths to be as evenly distributed as possible among the different regions of the world--Europe, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, Africa, and so on.

A nation can have at most one boat entered in each class.  That means that in slalom, each nation may have at most five Olympians: a female kayaker, a male kayaker, a male single canoeist, and a pair of male tandem canoeists.  That brings me to the part I haven't figured out yet: according to an article I read in Canoe and Kayak magazine the other day, the IOC and/or the ICF have determined that the U.S. is limited to four warm bodies on its slalom team.  That means that at least one member of the U.S. C2 must be somebody who's already on the Olympic team as a single-boat racer.  It just so happens that both Casey Eichfeld and Michal Smolen are racing in C2s as well as their single boats, so that shouldn't be a problem, but it's nevertheless weird.  I'm sure there's a full explanation somewhere in the bowels of either the ICF or the USA Canoe-Kayak website, but as both those organizations are notorious for releasing information in the form of long, excruciating legalese-laced PDF documents, I just don't have the will to unearth the answer.  I invite anybody who can provide us a readable explanation to do so in the "Comments" section.

I'll just add this: I'm sort of rooting for Casey Eichfeld's C2 to make the Olympic Team because his partner is Devin McEwan, son of the first U.S. Olympic medalist in whitewater slalom.  Devin's dad Jamie took the C1 bronze medal in the 1972 Games at Augsburg, West Germany.  We just lost Jamie to cancer two years ago, and I know he would be thrilled to see another McEwan running the gates in the Olympics.

Once again, thanks for reading down this far.  I'll post updates here about both the flatwater and the whitewater selection processes as they develop.