El Chaco, Ecuador – In the world of sports, “the line” has many interpretations. It might be considered the point spread or the front five, the end zone or the boundary. In the world of raft racing, it’s all that and then some. But ultimately it remains a matter of interpretation.
It only took one day of racing at the 2005 International Rafting Federation (IRF) World Championships on Ecuador’s Quijos River for the men and women of the U.S. national champion whitewater rafting teams to discover that truth, with the Vail-based women’s team learning a hard and fast lesson on interpretation in the downriver sprint portion of the three-event competition.
Leading in a head-to-head quarterfinal race against the women’s team from Norway, the U.S. team, made up of captain Katherine “Bugs” Bugby, Lisa Sackville, Cristin Zimmer, Dawn Vogeler, Lisa Reeder and Gabriella Klednik, opted for a difficult route – their line – through the final set of rapids in the roughly half-mile race. A minor miscalculation caused the boat to shift left and broach momentarily on a dry rock in the river, just long enough for the Norwegians to slip past on the faster jet of whitewater to the right. The mistake would prove to be the Americans’ undoing in the overall competition among the 13 nations represented in this fifth IRF World Championship, Oct. 12-16.
“We made a mistake and pretty much gave them the race at that point,” Bugby said. “Then we just didn’t have enough river to get it back.”
A similar scenario was unfolding in the semifinal round of the men’s race, the difference being that the ominously named Behind the 8 Ball team from Vail found itself living up to its moniker and trailing the powerhouse Czech Republic heading into the same whitewater boil. When the Czechs moved left, the front line of Ollie Dose, Chip Carney, Todd Toledo and Ben Bungartz dug their paddle blades into the river as guides Mike Reid and Chris “Mongo” Reeder steered the 16-foot Sotar raft through the right line and on to victory.
A repeat performance against the men’s team from Canada in the final round gave the U.S. team the gold medal among the field of 23 boats, its first in a world championship event.
“We spent a day practicing every line and timing ourselves to see which was the fastest,” Reeder said. “We couldn’t believe it when the Czechs went left and gave us the line we wanted. It was definitely much faster. Then the Canadians did the exact same thing.”
Winning the opening event in the cumulative competition put the Yanks in a position to do something else they never had achieved – win the overall IRF World Championship title. Entering the slalom competition, they already had beaten the spread, sitting ahead of the Czechs, the Russians, the Germans – everyone. No one expected them to be there, not even themselves.
“Certain things just sort of fell into place. To be honest, a lot of it was luck,” Toledo said at the event’s midway point. “The Germans are the best team here. They brought over their national slalom coach to train these guys. We’re talking full-on Olympic medal winners, not like the little ones we get. We’re just six guys with a raft. It’s tough to compete with that.”
Raising the bar
But that was precisely what the U.S. team had come to do. After forming five years ago, the team nucleus has remained more or less intact for the past four years, taking one of the hardest lines imaginable simply to be within striking distance of a podium finish in world championship competition. The team of ski patrollers, firemen, commercial raft guides and the like – some married with children – has dedicated countless hours to year-round training, fundraising and travel for a sport that offers little more than a pat on the back and cold beer with your competition at the end of long, soggy day. This was all about bragging rights.
“Our goal is to win,” Reid said. “The last time our goal was to come in top five. Now we’ve seen what it takes to win and have tried to position ourselves so that we can have that opportunity.”
A respectable fifth-place finish in the technically challenging slalom discipline won by Russia put the U.S. men in second place overall heading into the downriver race – their strongest event.
Mistakes costly to U.S. women
The women, meanwhile, continued to be snake-bitten, sticking a clean line through the first 10 gates on the course before picking up a 50-second penalty when two women in the raft failed to slide between the slalom poles at gate 11. After two days of competition, they limped into eighth place overall.
“We are killing ourselves with little mistakes,” Bugby said. “If you eliminate those two mistakes we’re right in there. But that’s raft racing. Someone will always make a mistake and you just need to be in position to take advantage of it. Hopefully it’s someone else’s turn next.”
With the addition of paddler Jody Swaboda and the subtraction of several inches of river water in the downriver finale, the U.S. women put their heads down and ground out a third-place finish behind the teams from Czech Republic and New Zealand, the respective gold and silver medalists in overall competition. The women’s team from Slovakia took third overall, while the U.S. women placed sixth.
“We’re the most confident in the downriver. That’s the event we do best in,” said Lisa Reeder. “We know we’re in shape, and we usually do not fail. After the sprint and the slalom, we didn’t want to go out like that. So we really wanted to show what we could do in the downriver.”
Chanting a similar mantra, the U.S. men ultimately found themselves outgunned in the downriver race that amounted to a low-water marathon. Needing to beat the Russians to claim the overall title, the Americans could do no better than fifth as the Czechs managed a 23-second margin over Germany in their 1-hour, 10-minute, 29-second victory. A third-place finish by Russia was good enough to secure the overall title with 853 points, followed by the Czech Republic with 832 and the Americans in third with 774, one place ahead of Germany.
“The Czechs and Russians beat us cleanly,” Mongo Reeder said. “It wasn’t one big mistake that made the race. We were really tight until about the halfway point, then they passed us and pulled away.”
Still, by claiming a podium position in the overall competition, the men accomplished something no other rafting team from the U.S. has in the history of the IRF Worlds or even its unofficial precursor, the Camel Challenge.
“Russia, Czech Republic and us,” Toledo said. “You go back in history and those guys are the world champs in everything that has to do with moving a boat through water. Just to be named with those countries in rafting is so cool.”
Staff writer Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-820-1993 or at swilloughby@denverpost.com.
