Minturn – Eric Jackson did something Wednesday he almost never does on the Eagle River.
The four-time world champion freestyle kayaker and returning champ of the Teva Mountain Games’ race down Dowd Chute let two racers pass him early in the four-at-a-time paddlecross down the rowdy half mile of Class IV whitewater.
“We were in a full sprint early. The pace was too fast for me,” said the paddling patriarch, who last month won his fourth title at the World Freestyle Kayaking Championships in Canada. “I knew I was going to blowout, so I let ’em by. That’s always dumb.”
Jackson was surprised when he saw kayaking masters Tao Berman and Jason Beakes pass him. In the game of downriver kayak racing, the early leaders typically win, and Jackson rarely cedes the early lead. His strategy, the one that has elevated him to kayaking king, was crumbling. Then he saw his hole.
“I made the picture-perfect pass at the first gate. It felt so cool. It was the most exciting thing for me,” he said. “It doesn’t always work that way. Actually, it almost never works out that way.”
Berman, with a couple of world waterfall records under his kayaking skirt, knew better than to swell with confidence when he passed Jackson.
“Head-to-head is always a tossup,” said Berman, 28, from Washington state. “There are too many variables beyond my control. Three variables, really: the three people trying to take me out.”
Beakes finished third, relying heavily on his early career as a slalom kayaker, where he mostly raced the clock on carefully controlled courses. The race down Dowd, which required boaters to sneak around four gates floating in eddies in the middle of the maelstrom, required slalom racing and creek boating skills.
“It’s like slalom in that you have a really precise plan for hitting the gates but it’s also like creeking because you have to be ready to shift your plan at any moment,” Beakes said. “People coming from pure racing disciplines have trouble with that dynamic component.”
The Dowd race is a historical contest in the Vail Valley and the wellspring of the Teva Mountain Games. A decade ago, dozens of valley paddlers would rally for the rite-of-passage race, which seemed to always arrive as “The Chute” reached a gut-wrenching level of turbulence. Today, the race draws the best paddlers in the world.
Nikki Kelly of New Zealand usurped her Aussie friend Tanya Faux’s Dowd title. Faux, who won the race last year and this week won the Paddling Life Invitational at Steamboat, finished third behind California’s Shannon Carroll, who arrived in Vail just in time for the race after finishing her nursing licensure exams Tuesday.
“We always push each other so hard,” said Faux, whose loss in Dowd is fueling her push to best Kelly in today’s steep creek race down Homestake Creek above Red Cliff.
Money day
The world champion Behind the 8-Ball rafting team from Vail dominated the rafting competition, with decisive wins in every heat. In the time trial that started the competition, the 8-Ball crew finished 15 seconds ahead of the next team.
“Today was all business for sure,” said Chris “Mongo” Reeder, a core member of the team that won the world rafting sprint race in Ecuador two years ago and heads to this year’s world championship in South Korea next month. “We really needed that check to pay our way to worlds. Today was a work day.”
Coming today
Another Vail Valley tradition that has evolved into a showcase event for the world’s best, the race down Homestake is more of a plummet, with paddlers dropping 120 feet in one of Colorado’s wildest quarter miles of whitewater. With an added 100 cubic feet per second pouring through the mini-gorge this morning, this year’s race will offer spectacular creek boating with an international field. Watch for last year’s champ, Pat Keller, a young champion of the venerable Green River race in his home North Carolina, to continue his reign.
Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
