SALIDA — With apologies to Mississippi River rat Samuel Clemens: The rumors of the death of slalom canoe and kayak racing have been greatly exaggerated. But they’re already celebrating quite a wake in Colorado.
Nearly 100 competitors — from ages younger than 10 to older than 50 — signed up to race the whitewater slalom Saturday through a course of “gates” strung above the Arkansas River at FIBArk Festival, telling veterans of the Olympic paddling discipline that the sport some have written off as dead on the vine remains ripe for a new generation.
“Slalom isn’t going anywhere,” former Olympic kayak racer and four-time freestyle world champion Eric Jackson said between heats of his fourth-place slalom finish Saturday. “U.S. participation numbers have dropped some, but that’s kind of natural. When a lot of us started paddling in the early ’80s, we did it in slalom boats. Then plastic boats evolved and got shorter and more maneuverable. They became the higher-performance boats over slalom boats for general river running, so fewer people would buy a slalom boat unless they were really into racing. But it’s still alive and well.”
As part of the 62-year-old FIBArk Festival, slalom racing was introduced to “America’s oldest and boldest whitewater festival” in the 1950s, joining the 26-mile downriver kayak race as the technical test for the title of “First in Boating on the Arkansas River.” More than 50 years later, it is still attracting top competitors from around the world, including a half- dozen Olympic athletes and world champions from five nations.
In slalom racing, paddlers negotiate a course similar to that of the namesake skiing discipline, the difference being a two-second penalty for touching any of the 20 gates they paddle past. The skill is evident as kayaks and canoes no shorter than 3.5 meters (about 11 1/2 feet) negotiate tricky river currents in order to pass through the gates in both downstream and upstream directions. Miss the move — or pass through upside down — and the penalty is an insurmountable 50 seconds.
“It’s a really tricky sport. You’re really reacting to a lot of different things,” said race winner Scott Shipley, a three-time Olympian and three-time World Cup overall champion living in Lyons. “I get really high on the speed. It’s such a challenge to put together a really good, clean run. But when you do, it’s really satisfying.”
Shipley, 39, has left the rigors of kayak competition to focus on building slalom courses internationally. He’s the primary designer of the U.S. National Whitewater Center in Charlotte, N.C., and will travel to England — where there are nearly 4,000 ranked slalom racers — at the end of July to turn on the water at his recently completed Olympic whitewater course for the 2012 London Games.
Between projects, however, he has established a budding slalom program in Lyons, helping coach and evaluate talented young paddlers seeking to follow in his footsteps as America’s most successful competitive kayaker.
“I’m not really out there to be a coach, but every so often a kid will come over and check out what we’re doing,” Shipley said. “I’ve never had a kid not stick around. It’s one of those things like skiing — it sells itself.”
Among those to come calling was Tyler Hinton, whom Shipley believes has what it takes to make his mark on the European-dominated discipline. Hinton, a senior at the Alexander Dawson School in Lafayette, finished third in the overall division of the U.S. national championships in C-1 (one-man “canoe” racing with a single-bladed paddle) last year and will represent the U.S. at the 2010 Slalom Junior World Championships in France this summer.
“We haven’t had a junior world champion since I did it in ’88,” Shipley said. “Tyler has a good chance of being next.”
Hinton will be joined by 16-year-old Zach Lokken of Durango at the junior worlds. While Hinton was winning the C-1 division of the FIBArk slalom Saturday, Lokken was entering his first World Cup slalom race in Prague, where he failed to advance to the finals as a rookie on the U.S. Canoe and Kayak Team. Micki Reeves, 20, of Grand Junction finished 14th in the women’s World Cup race.
“There’s a lot of young talent out there,” said Cory Nielson of Durango, men’s masters division champion and former Panama Olympic Team coach. “I honestly think Zach is on his way to being world champion. He’s 16 and he’s paddling as well as anybody.”
Durango, like Salida and now Lyons, has a long established community racing program and is considered among the top breeding grounds for the sport.
Other programs in the state are found in Carbondale and through the Rocky Mountain Canoe and Kayak Association in Golden, although Shipley believes the ultimate secret to success lies in leaving Colorado in order to train year round.
“I’m interested in kicking kids out of the state, to some degree,” Shipley said. “The top athletes train on the order of 600-700 times a year, and you just can’t do that in the winter in Colorado. You’d be amazed at how many people don’t show up to kayak when it’s snowing.”
Still, the advancements in plastic slalom kayak designs and the advent of grassroots racing programs in Colorado and nationwide are introducing slalom to the masses, Shipley says. Freestyle kayaking appears to have hit a plateau since its prime-time heyday in the early 2000s, and even some of the top young rodeo boaters have found an affinity for the precision required to paddle fast.
“At the beginning, it was fun just to do something different, but I really started to like it when I learned how to go fast and started getting good,” 16-year-old freestyle phenom Dane Jackson of Rock Island, Tenn., said of his recent foray into slalom racing. “I think slalom is going to keep going and getting better along with the new boats, just like freestyle. All of it is really fun.”
Scott Willoughby: 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com
