Monday photo feature

Cathy Summers has posted more photos on Face Book since last Monday.  If you use Face Book I encourage you to visit the pages "Catherine Summers' Photography" and "Whitewater Slalom Alumni and Friends" to check them out.

Her latest albums contain photos from the 1989 season.  1979 had been a special year because U.S. athletes won multiple world championships medals for the first time ever, and 1989 was just as special because the world championships took place in the U.S. for the first time ever.  The best whitewater paddlers in the world put their boats on the Savage River in Maryland to compete for the sport's most prestigious titles, and Cathy Summers was there with her camera once more.

Paddling here are the late Jamie McEwan in the bow and Lecky Haller in the stern.  These two need no introduction to anybody familiar with whitewater slalom racing in the U.S.  Jamie had won the first-ever Olympic medal for the U.S. when he took the C1 bronze in 1972, and Lecky had been a C2 world champion with his brother Fritz in 1983.  After joining forces in the mid 1980s, Jamie and Lecky quickly became one of the top slalom C2s in the world: they were silver medalists at the 1987 world championships, won the overall World Cup title in 1988, took fourth at the 1989 worlds, and finished fourth at the 1992 Olympics.

What fewer people are aware of is that Jamie and Lecky did some wildwater racing as well.  Nowadays the non-Olympic wildwater discipline is sort of the unfortunate stepsister while slalom basks in the Olympic spotlight, but once upon a time the two were considered equal and many athletes, like Davey Hearn and Ron Lugbill in last week's photo feature, participated in both, just as skiers commonly race both the slalom and downhill events.  Slalom's re-inclusion on the Olympic programme in 1992, along with wildwater's non-inclusion, brought that relationship to an end.  1993 was the last year in which the slalom and wildwater world championships took place together on a regular basis.

Because of that, Ms. Summers's photo sets contain many relics of a bygone era.  In this photo Jamie and Lecky switch over to the wildwater boat for a run down the Savage River at the 1989 worlds.