Five-ring fever   by Elmore Holmes August, 2004      "Are you involved in the Olympics again this year?"      That's the question I got from a friend of my parents recently, and it made me laugh that somebody thought I had ever been even peripherally involved in the Olympic Games.  To set the record straight, I did compete in the Olympic Trials for whitewater slalom four years ago, but anyone who thinks that I was even within sniffing distance of a spot on the Olympic team doesn't realize how much worse I was than the people who ended up going to Sydney.      No, my involvement in the Olympics this year will be the same that it was in 2000, 1996, 1992, and every previous quadrennium in my lifetime: I'm going to plop myself down in front of the television set and watch.      I'll watch lots of track and field, maybe a wrestling match or two.  But my main interest will be the sport I write about in this column.      Paddling made its Olympic debut when flatwater sprint athletes got to compete in Berlin in 1936.  Sprint has been a fixture in every Games since.  Whitewater slalom climbed aboard in Augsburg, West Germany, as part of the 1972 Munich Games, then immediately disappeared, apparently because the organizers of the '76 Montreal Games didn't want to fool with it.  But it came back in la Seu d'Urgell, Spain, in 1992, and has achieved a foothold at least through the 2008 Beijing Games.

Elmore's columns appear monthly at the Outdoors, Inc.,website: www.outdoorsinc.com

     The slalom racers will be up first, competing August 17 through August 20.  Slalomists race one boat at a time through a course of about 20 gates that hang over a section of whitewater river.  A gate consists of two pieces of PVC pipe four to five feet apart, and the paddler's head and part of his boat must pass between these poles for a correct negotiation of the gate.  Some of the gates (those with green and white poles) must be run in a "downstream" direction, while for others (whose poles are red and white) the paddler must drop below the gate and paddle upstream through it.  Each racer gets two runs on the course, and his score is the sum of the elapsed times from the two runs, plus penalties--one gets a two-second penalty for touching a pole as he negotiates a gate, and a 50-second penalty for missing the gate entirely.  At the world-class level, a single two-second penalty is often enough to bump a racer out of the medals.
     A typical slalom course run at the world-class level takes about 100 seconds--roughly the same length of time it takes a world-class 800-meter runner to cover his distance.  So the cardiovascular fitness of a slalom racer is not much different from that of a middle-distance runner.  But slalom is a much more technical sport than running, and the racers must devote a large chunk of their training time to practicing strokes and techniques in the gates.  Because technique is so important in slalom, most athletes do their physical work concurrently with their technical work.  Slalom also presents other challenges that would simply boggle a runner's mind.  The gate positions are a secret until the eve of the race, and no two competitions feature exactly the same course.  No practice runs are allowed.  So the racers must practice a broad variety of gate combinations in the hope of simulating the moves they must perform on race day.  They also spend a lot of time just thinking about moves--a practice known as mental rehearsal, or visualization.  Since the Athens World Cup race in April, each slalom Olympian has gone over the course in his or her mind thousands of times, committing every wave, hole, and eddy to a mental video tape.  When the gate positions are revealed for the Games, each athlete will imagine his view from the boat of each gate as he paddles through it.
     Four boat classes will take to the whitewater in Athens: men's single canoe (C-1), men's double canoe (C-2), men's single kayak (K-1), and ladies' single kayak (K-1W).  The C-1 and K-1W classes will compete on the first two days, with preliminaries on the 17th and semifinals and finals on the 18th.  Then the K-1 and C-2 classes will repeat the process on the 19th and 20th.
     Most interesting in the slalom competition will be the venue.  Located near the old airport on the southwest edge of Athens, the Helliniko Olympic Complex features not only slalom but also handball, fencing, baseball, softball, and some preliminary basketball games--for the first time ever, slalom will be right in the thick of the Olympic Games rather than way out of town.  The manmade course pumps water in from the Saronic Gulf, making it the first major slalom course in the world to use salt water, and this element presents a novel challenge for the racers, most of whom have spent their careers living and training on freshwater mountain streams.  So far the reviews have been positive.  After training on the course and competing in a World Cup event there, the Olympic athletes are calling it fast, challenging, and exciting.

     The "flatties" will race distances of 500 meters and 1000 meters from August 23 until August 28.  If you think of the standard 400-meter track over at your local high school, 500 meters is one-and-one-quarter laps of the track, while 1000 meters is two-and-a-half laps.  Some people might not consider these distances to be all that daunting, but the sprint competitors will argue otherwise.  Their races are short enough that one must race at near-maximum intensity the whole way, but long enough to require considerable strength and endurance as well.  My experience racing over such a distance is to want to yak up my breakfast at the finish.  Sprinters train by logging thousands of miles to build an endurance base and perfect the forward stroke.  They pile plenty of speed work, pace work, and start practice on top of all this mileage.
     Flatwater features a few more boat classes than slalom.  The sprinters race C-1, C-2, K-1, and K-1W, but they also have K-2 and K-4 for both men's and women's competition.
     The sprint venue, which the paddlers share with the rowers, is just as interesting as the slalom venue, but for a different reason.  The Schinias Olympic Rowing and Canoeing Centre is located northeast of Athens near Marathon, and the burning question is, What bonehead decided to put the venue here?  The place is famous for its strong winds, and at no time of year are they stronger than in August.  Windsurfers come from around the world to ply their craft here, but flatwater kayakers and canoeists don't like wind so much.  The canoeists, who don't use rudders and whose high-kneel positions force them to paddle strictly on one side of the boat, will have particular difficulty if the weather is like it usually is here in August.  Expect to see some struggles, and even some swims.  One friend of mine has suggested that this spectacle will benefit the sport by bringing greater media coverage than usual for the sprint paddling event.  I guess if our nation's current military aggressiveness is truly a reflection of the attitudes of our society, then my friend might have a point, but I would prefer that people tune in to see great paddling rather than carnage.

     Soon, it will be time for us back here in the U.S. to turn on the TV and watch our Olympic Team paddlers "go for the gold," as it were.  This is our great Olympic challenge.
     Watching the Olympics on TV can be a frustrating endeavor for fans of sports other than gymnastics, track and field, swimming, diving, beach volleyball, Dream Team basketball, and anything else deemed a "glamor sport" by those arbiters of opinion at the NBC television network.  Our sport, wonderful as it is, never seems to make the "A" list.
     In 2000, I was determined to catch all the slalom action from Penrith Whitewater Stadium outside of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.  After all, I had just raced at Trials with the five people who were representing the U.S., and I was brimming with team spirit.  But it was not easy.  The broadcast schedule at nbcolympics.com listed time blocks of four hours or more during which slalom was most likely to appear, but it got no more specific than that.  And so, I had to put the rest of my life on hold and devote my entire day to watching TV, suffering through segment after segment of pre-adolescent gymnasts and their overbearing coaches, "human interest" stories on this swimmer or that, and Nike commercials.
     For the first two days of the slalom competition, footage aired during the time blocks that NBC's website said it would, so I got to see all the coverage of the C-1 and K-1W classes.  And the coverage was pretty good, too, especially for my personal favorite, the C-1 class: they showed both runs for about eight or nine of the twelve racers in the final round.
     The second two days didn't go as well.  I understand there was good coverage of the C-2 and K-1 classes, but I saw almost none of it because NBC started deviating from its published schedule.  They had the K-1 finals listed in prime time, but I sat and watched from 6:30 until 11 o'clock and didn't see a single paddle stroke.  My guess is that when U.S. medal favorite Scott Shipley ended up placing fifth, the network muckety-mucks decided to shuffle slalom into a more obscure time slot.
     I paid less attention to the sprint competition, which took place during the second week of the Games.  After getting no work done for four days during the slalom races, I had some catching up to do.  But I did get to see all the 500-meter finals, which aired on the final day of the Olympics.
     This year, NBC promises better coverage than ever, utilizing four or five cable outlets that have been sucked beneath the network's corporate umbrella in the last four years.  But the schedule at nbcolympics.com still does not narrow the broadcast times down to anything smaller than a 90-minute time block, and a lot of the coverage will take place in the early morning hours.  Coverage could be modified at a moment's notice (if a U.S. paddler wins a medal, for instance), so one must pay close attention as the week moves along.
     Here is the slalom schedule, as it stands right now (thanks to Jennifer and Davey Hearn for distilling this information over at daveyhearn.com):

(all times EDT; viewers in western time zones should check local listings)

Tuesday, August 17: Preliminary round for C-1 and K-1W
NBC 12:30 PM-4:00 PM

Wednesday, August 18: Semifinal and final rounds for C-1 and K-1W
K-1W: NBC 12:35 AM-2:00 AM
C-1: MSNBC 1:30 AM-7:00 AM

Thursday, August 19: Preliminary round for K-1 and C-2
NBC 12:30 PM-4:00 PM

Friday, August 20: Semifinal and final rounds for K-1 and C-2
NBC 12:35 AM-2:00 AM
USA 7:00 AM-Noon
 

     The sprint schedule includes multiple rounds of heats, so you'd be best served to monitor the nbcolympics.com schedule.  But here is the current broadcast schedule for the final rounds:

Friday, August 27: 1000-meter finals
USA 7:00 AM-9:30 AM
NBC 12:30 PM-4:00 PM

Saturday, August 28: 500-meter finals
NBC Noon-6:00 PM
NBC 8:00 PM-Midnight
 

     So… who's gonna win this year?  Is it time for Holmes's Can't-Miss Olympic Medal Picks^TM?
     Um, no.  I'm not going to do that.
     I have some opinions as to who I think might do well and who I'd like to see do well, but these athletes have enough pressure on them without me tossing my semi-informed prognostication into the mix.
     Besides, the individual stories are the real allure of the Olympics for me.
     Their prodigious athletic gifts aside, the canoe and kayak athletes are all delightfully normal people like you and me.  They went to school and did their homework.  They cook their own meals and mow their own lawns.  They will move on into ordinary careers when their international competition is done.  They got into paddling the same way the rest of us did: at summer camp, or on a family camping trip, or in the local canoe club.
     But once every four years, they enjoy the same status as the household names like Michael Johnson and Greg Louganis and Mary Lou Retton.  No Olympian is less an Olympian than any other Olympian, and the dead-last-place finisher in the qualifying heats has a story just as captivating as the person standing atop the medal podium.  All the politics and commercialism surrounding the Olympics can get a little sickening, but the key to enjoying the Games is to stay focused on the athletes, for whom the Games exist in the first place.
     I encourage you to read up on the folks you'll see paddling the Mediterranean sea water in Athens.  You can find profiles of the U.S. Team athletes at the USA Canoe/Kayak website (www.usack.org) and at the NBC TV website (www.nbcolympics.com).  There's an archive of Games-related articles at the site of three-time Olympic canoeist Davey Hearn, www.daveyhearn.com.  Cathy Hearn, a former U.S. Olympian who now coaches the Italian national team, has written a nice preview in the current (July-August) issue of American Whitewater.  Other countries have sites that feature their canoe and kayak athletes, and a simple Google search will yield more information than you can swallow.
     A handful of the U.S. paddlers have their own sites.  Take a look at these:

Chris Ennis, whitewater slalom single canoe: www.chrisennisracing.com
Brett Heyl, whitewater slalom kayak: www.brettheyl.com
Jeff Smoke, flatwater sprint kayak: www.jeffsmoke.com
Matt Taylor and Joe Jacobi, whitewater slalom double canoe: www.canoeracer.com
Bartosz Wolski, flatwater sprint kayak: www.bartoszwolski.com

     Here's to those two weeks every four years when the rest of the world gets to see what you and I know every day--that there's simply nothing better than paddling a boat.