The Whitewater Revolution
How American C-1 paddlers changed the sport forever.
It’s early morning on the Potomac River in spring. A diaphanous mist swirls slowly above the current as a great blue heron croaks and flies away.
I step to the edge of a narrow side channel called the Feeder Canal, only twenty minutes upstream from the Washington Monument. The channel is historic among whitewater slalom racers, because it is where boat design and whitewater paddling techniques were changed forever.
I drop my boat in the water. It’s hand-built of fiberglass, kevlar, and carbon fiber. Light, only 24 pounds. Thirteen feet long, and tapers off to a sharp point at either end. The deck and hull of the boat are joined in a sharp edge, designed to slice through the water. At the center is a round opening.
This boat is a canoe. More properly, it’s a C-1, which is the racing designation for a single-person, decked slalom canoe. To most people, it looks like a kayak, but there is a big difference: kayakers sit on their bottoms, legs extended in front of them, and use a double-bladed paddle. In a C-1, you kneel, legs folded beneath, and use a single-bladed paddle. (The three racers in the photo above are all in C-1’s: note their use of a single-bladed canoe paddle.)
I slip my legs into the cockpit, kneeling on a narrow pedestal, my legs folded beneath me. Then I tighten straps anchored to the boat’s hull. The straps, one over each thigh, are critical. Once tight, they enable the light, strong boat to become an extension of your body. Every movement of your hips is translated directly to the boat.
A neoprene sprayskirt is stretched around the cockpit, and I’m sealed in. It’s cold, maybe 40 degrees, and I exhale into my hands for a bit of warmth before sliding my lower hand into a neoprene cuff around the paddle shaft. The paddle itself is a small miracle: handcrafted wood covered in carbon fiber. It’s ultra-light, stiff, and incredibly strong.
A gentle push against the clay bank and I drift into the channel. Then I put the blade into the water—without actually taking a stroke—and the sliver of a boat reacts instantly, slowly spinning. A quick feathering of the blade points the bow upstream. I rotate at the waist, winding up torso muscles, lower arm fully extended, plant the blade up near the bow…and unwind.
The boat slips forward smoothly and silently, as if there were no current. With good paddling technique, you don’t pull the paddle back to you—you pull yourself and the boat up to where you planted the blade.
Great sycamore trees leaning over the river glide past as I accelerate with each stroke, heading toward the swift current and standing waves at the top of the channel.
Slalom C-1's once looked like traditional canoes. In the 1970s, a small, unknown group of American whitewater canoeists in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. changed all that. They took advantage of the lack of specifications governing the shape of boats. In whitewater slalom (which is an Olympic sport), you race through a series of gates suspended over the rapids. A gate consists of two poles about a meter apart. The bottoms of the poles are around six inches above the water.
In the 70's, slalom canoes had high,upswept ends like a traditional canoe. This required the racer to paddle straight between the poles to keep from touching one. (Unlike alpine ski slalom, you incur a penalty for every gate you touch.) The D.C. racers discovered that if the ends of the boats were lower than the center—sitting just above the waterline—they could sneak the bow or stern under the gate poles.
This was huge. Being able to sneak the bow and stern under gate poles opened up a new world of paddling technique. C-1 racers no longer had to approach a gate head-on, but could dive into a gate from the side, wrapping their torso around the inside pole while sneaking the decks of the boat under the poles. Was it cheating? Maybe, but it revolutionized whitewater slalom—and whitewater paddling everywhere.
The D.C. racers continued to redesign and build their own boats. They streamlined the boat’s shape, which became more dagger-like, with sharp edges and elegant, pointed bows and sterns. By giving the boat sharp edges along the sides, they made another huge discovery: when making a hard, fast turn into a gate, they leaned to the outside of the turn (instead of leaning into the turn like a bicyclist). Leaning away from the turn caused the sharp, thin stern of the boat to slice beneath the water, popping the bow up and enabling the racer to pivot in place around a gate pole. It was spectacular to watch, and a deadly-fast way to get in and out of a gate. (In the image at the top of the post, the racer in the middle, 1985 world champion Davey Hearn, deliberately slices the bow underwater to pivot through the gate.)
At the 1979 world championships in Jonquiere, Quebec, the D.C. racers showed up with their radically-modified slalom C-1's. The Europeans—who had dominated the world championships—were still paddling old-school canoes with high ends.
During their race runs, Jon Lugbill, Davey Hearn, Bob Robison, Kent Ford and others riveted the crowd with their crazy-fast pivot turns through gates. European racers literally ran down the riverbank following the Americans, wide-eyed with shock and amazement. The Americans swept the medals, winning gold, silver and bronze.
At the top of the Feeder Canal, I pause for a moment, looking down through the maze of wooden poles hanging over the swift current. I work out a course in my head: dive across the top wave and down the green gate…up through the red gate in the eddy on the left…down the green in the middle…up in the red gate in the eddy behind the rocks on the right, and down the two offset gates in the middle.
I glance at my watch, and when the seconds reach zero at the top of the minute, I dig into the current with all my strength. I slice across the face of the top wave, surfing it without being pushed downstream, until I’m just above the first gate. I slip backwards through the gate while turning toward the first upstream gate in the eddy.
I get a couple power strokes to build speed, then dive into the eddy. I plant the blade in the water right next to the inside gate pole and lean away from the turn. The torque on my arms and shoulders reaches a high point as the rear deck of the C-1 slices underwater. The bow rises from the water and whips around the inside pole. I feather the blade around the inside pole and dig deep into the swift current exiting the gate. My arms and upper body are already pointed downstream while the boat, still pointing upstream, whips around to follow.
It took the Europeans over a decade to catch up to the American innovations in boats and technique. The American C-1's dominated, winning every world championship in the 1980s. Meanwhile, recreational kayakers borrowed the pivot-turn technique from the slalom racers and took it even farther: they developed a new (and some might say insane) form of kayaking called squirt boating.
In squirt boating, the boat is built with such low volume that it barely floats, partially submerged at the waterline. By slicing the sharp edges of the boat beneath the water along the interface between swift current and calmer eddy, squirt boaters literally disappear underwater and pop up downstream. They called it a mystery move.
After sprinting through five runs each on five different short slalom courses, I’m spent. But also exhilarated from an hour of dancing with the current. Not wanting to quit just yet, I paddle upstream above the canal and out into the main Potomac. The river drops over Brookmont dam, then over the rubble remains of an older dam, and narrows down to a series of rapids ending with Little Falls, just above Chain Bridge.
Though there are no slalom gates out on the river, I still paddle as if there were, working out precise lines through the rapids that dip in and out of every eddy and traverse every big standing wave. I pause above each rapid and study them, making quick mental notes of every rock, every boiling eddy line, every reaction wave, knowing in advance exactly how each will affect my line.
At Little Falls, where the fastest known water velocity was recorded during a post-hurricane flood, I skirt the biggest hydraulics by carving from eddy to eddy, surfing swiftly across the waves and hopping down through the class 3-4 rapid. Most huge rapids have a quiet route through—as long as you have the technique to stay on your line.
I take out below Little Falls to walk back up to the Feeder Canal along the C&O Canal towpath, and say a quiet thank you to those brilliant American C-1 racers who made what I do possible.
2016 UPDATE: In the years since those first pioneering American C-1 racers dominated the sport, that dominance has now ended. While tempting to say today’s American C-1 racers are slower, the reality is that they’re likely faster than our top racers in the 1980’s. What’s happened is that the Europeans have now caught up and passed us.
Whitewater slalom remains a summer Olympic sport, and and an American C-1 racer hasn’t won gold in a very long time. I believe the biggest reason for this is the lack of interest in the sport in the U.S.; I hope someday that will change.
