This screen-grab from NBC Sports footage shows Casey Eichfeld of Drums, Pennsylvania, moments after crossing the finish line in his final run of the U.S. Olympic trials at Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on Saturday.
How long has Casey been participating in the sport of whitewater slalom? I was still racing slalom myself when he first started showing up at races, so that's a pretty long time. If I remember correctly (it's possible I don't), the first time I ever saw him was at an age group nationals event at South Bend, Indiana, in the summer of 1999. He was hard not to notice: at 9 years old, he was three or four years younger than the next-youngest kid there. Then in November of that year I attended a Thanksgiving training camp on the Tuckasegee River at Bryson City, North Carolina, and Casey was there too. This would have been just after his 10th birthday. He was a tiny little kid, not exactly a threat to us "grown men," but he was already showing some solid technique in the gates.
Over the next several years I did less and less slalom racing myself, but I spotted Casey here and there, training and racing wherever he could even though he was too young to be eligible for the junior national team. Little by little the kid grew up, and in 2008--less than a decade after I'd first seen him--he made his first Olympic team, racing in men's double canoe (C2) at Beijing with partner Rick Powell. Four years after that Casey was in the Olympics again, racing in single canoe (C1) at London.
He was staying busy in the non-Olympic years, too, training all over the world, making national teams, and racing in World Cup series and, of course, the world championships. His finest moment might have come in the 2015 worlds at La Seu d'Urgell, Spain: in his final run, Casey seemed to be laying down a winning performance before a gate-touch penalty near the end of the course knocked him back to fourth place.
Unbowed, Casey came back to make his third Olympic team the next year. At Rio he raced in C1 and teamed with Devin McEwan to race C2 as well.
At this point Casey wasn't exactly old--he wasn't even 30 yet--but he was a veteran of two decades full of hundreds of thousands of paddle strokes all over the world. And he was now married, with thoughts of starting a family. The question of whether he shouldn't stow his paddle and get a "real job" was a legitimate one. But after serious thought and support from his wife, Casey decided he wanted to try to do something no other U.S. slalom racer had ever done: make a fourth Olympic team.
That meant another four years of training, and the Covid-19 pandemic turned that into five years, as the Tokyo Olympics was pushed back into 2021. And then Casey failed to make the team. He was beat out at the trials by a surging Zach Lokken of Durango, Colorado.
Once again it was decision time. But at least this time the next Olympics was just three years away, and Casey decided to give it one more shot. A few more cycles of training brought him to this month's Olympic trials, which began the weekend of April 13-14 at Montgomery, Alabama, and concluded this past weekend at Oklahoma City. Once again Zach Lokken was Casey's most formidable competitor, and coming out of the first weekend Lokken held a slim lead. Lokken maintained a slight edge after first runs at Oklahoma City, and Casey would say later, "Honestly, I thought it was gonna be Zach after the first run."
But then came second runs, and Casey uncorked a simply gorgeous display of speed, power, and precision. In the photo above he's just a couple of meters past the finish line, knowing he's posted a terrific time and unable to contain his emotions any longer. At this same moment Zach Lokken is sitting in his boat up at the start, about to take his last run, and while he can't know exactly what Casey has done, he's able to hear the spectators' reaction and the commentary of the venue announcer, and he has to know that Casey has just done something exceptional. In other words, he's not in an enviable position. He went on and made a valiant attempt to stick to his plan, but a time error early in the run spiraled into bigger mistakes farther down the course. I suspect he knew deep down it was game over. You can watch video footage of both Casey's run and Zach's run here.
Casey is one of two slalom racers the U.S. will send to Paris this summer. The other is Evy Leibfarth of Bryson City, North Carolina, the trials winner in women's kayak and women's canoe. Unfortunately, the U.S. did not qualify to enter a men's kayak athlete in the Olympics this year. Such qualifications are based on U.S. athletes' performances in last year's world championships and in a Pan American competition this spring.
I'll conclude by saying that even in this era of pro athletes at the Olympics and lucrative "N.I.L." endorsement deals and all that stuff, most Olympic athletes are not rolling in the dough, and that is especially true of athletes in the more media-marginalized sports like canoe and kayak racing. Meanwhile, the expenses are quite huge. In the several months between now and the opening ceremony at Paris, Casey will be traveling to train on the course there and also to do some World Cup racing to make sure his game is in order. He might get a little bit of financial support from the sport's national governing body, but it won't be nearly enough to cover all the airfare and lodging and other expenses he'll face. And so... anybody who would like to send a few bucks Casey's way can do so here.
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