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< Nov/Dec 2001
	Features
Breaking Out the Broom U.S. sweeps World rodeo Championships in Sort, Spain by Eugene Buchanan

Occupied by five members of the U.S. Freestyle team, the hotel room is a cross between a college dorm and river camp. Boating gear is strewn over the floor, a pair of nose plugs tops the TV and an open jar of chocolate spread threatens to ooze onto a copy of The Hobbit on the coffee table. "That belongs to the juniors," says Shane Benedict, who shares one of two rooms with his wife, Whitney Lonsdale. "I don’t know how they eat that stuff."

The fridge is hardly any better. Gin and tonic remains crowd an open yogurt, brie and bread, a can of Red Bull, and, believe it or not, some actual vegetables. Save for Eric Jackson, who rented an apartment across town, the entire U.S. team is staying here for Spain’s World Kayak Freestyle Championships. Like a youth hostel, the rest of the hotel is filled with Canadians, Brits, Germans, Italians, Japanese and a lone Israeli entrant. The chocolate spreaders are juniors Marlow Long and Jesse "The Weasel" Murphy, who sleep within slurping distance of the concoction on trundles pulled out from the couch. "It’s tight, but it’s homey," says Benedict.

The tight quarters reflect the tightness of the team. "I really think we have a shot at winning the gold in every category," Benedict continues, strolling through the war zone to the porch. "We’re strong in everything." Though today’s quarter-finals reduced the men’s field from 40 to 15--eliminating such stalwarts as Dan Gavere and Clay Wright--the U.S. still has EJ, Eric Southwick, Andrew Holcombe and Jimmy Blakeney in the running. And it’s equally strong in every other category. Erica Mitchell and Tanya Shuman are in top standing after the women’s quarter-finals; the juniors swept the top five spots in their quarter-finals; and Eli Helbert, Barry Kennon, Luke Hopkins and Chris Manderson carried the red, white and blue to top quarter-final honors in C-1 and OC-1.

On the balcony overlooking the pool, Bendict points out Marlow hanging out by the bus station across the park. "Weasel and Marlow love it here," he says. "They can see every time a bus brings a new shipment of high school girls into town." Benedict’s eyes then drift to the pool. "They also figure it’s only 12 horizontal feet to the pool, which you’d have to clear in three stories," he says. "Maybe one of them will do it later on."

The resultant splash might well bring a tongue-lashing from Jacque, the hotel owner and a former downriver world champion. But it would be nothing compared to the splash the U.S. team is about to make at the World Championships.

Spain’s Rio Noguerra Pallaresa, coursing through the Pyrenees-lined village of Sort 2,300 feet above the Mediterranean Sea, is a wise choice for the Worlds. Organizer Lluis Rabaneda, who grew up six miles upstream of the event site and owns a local rafting company, knew he had a prime venue when competitors arrived at the first Euro Cup Rodeo in 1999 and suggested he bid for the Worlds. He carried his campaign to New Zealand later that year, beat out the Zambezi, and secured flows from a dam upstream, guaranteeing the hole’s thrashiness. "A lot of people felt media accessibility was more important than wave size," he says. By rebuilding the playspot after the PreWorlds a year earlier, he’s achieved both. "There should be three to four thousand people here for the nighttime semi-finals," he adds.

All it takes is one glance downstream while driving over the bridge into town to see that the event site is perfect. Below several standing waves is a horizon line hiding a river-wide hole, flanked by grandstands on one side and an umbrella-shielded judge’s stand on the other. It’s accessible, formidable and, unlike the surging wave in New Zealand, retentive. Earlier that day seven competitors swam out of it--an ideal site to test the 400 of the world’s best paddlers from 27 countries.

The event’s international flavor shows itself that night at dinner. Conversations in Italian, French, German and Japanese echo off the cobblestone walls, as do a few I can’t place. Then I hear some familiar voices in a familiar tongue. Fueling up for the quarter-finals in an adjacent room, Gavere, Wick and Benedict share a family portion of pork chops from a huge casserole dish.

If the casual service and language hurdles don’t prove I am in Spain, the event schedule does. Tonight’s dance party at the Rock Dur disco doesn’t start until 11 p.m., par for the course. I arrive at 11:30 and am still too early. Despite the next day’s competition, a few competitors are still up and about. I belly up next to South Africa’s Steve Fisher, who flew here after winning Montreal’s Big Water Invitational. "Check this out," he says, pointing to a huge, yellowish glass he’s sharing with a lady friend. "Red Bull, with a twenty-second pour of vodka." Though such training might work for him, most competitors are fast asleep.

For good reason: a lot of pride--and sponsorship--is at stake. No one knows this better than Keith Wallace, brand manager and "Team Babysitter" for WaveSport, which sent 16 athletes to the Worlds (the second highest count was Perception, with 13). "Winning’s definitely important," says Wallace. "If you have World Champions, it validates everything you do. You can’t buy the exposure it brings. People perceive you as being the best if your athletes are best." To keep track of his paddlers, Wallace allocates points for everything from victories and media exposure to conducting clinics for the company. "Winning something like the Worlds gives you leverage when you go back in for negotiations--we review the points annually to determine who we’ll keep on the team," he says.

The pressure to win, then, is surging every bit as much as the playhole. But despite this, there’s an undercurrent of fun that’s hard to ignore. This shows itself the next day in a playspot upstream. At the squirt semi-finals, a Japanese contestant strikes a Sumo pose before paddling. Another competitor swings his bib over his head in a circle. Someone else blows kisses to the crowd. When’s the last time you saw that at a slalom race? Disco parties add to the aura, as do parties hosted by various countries. A flier pasted on the hotel message board reads: "Dutch Freestyle BBQ Party! Bring Your own Food, Drinks and Condoms. Featuring fire-acts, skinny dippin’, music and a Miss/Mister Freestyle World’s Contest."

Frolicking aside, for many of these contestants paddling’s their job. And they’re damn good at it. In fact, they’re the best of the best, as illustrated in the afternoon’s quarter-finals. Every name rattled off belongs in a Who’s Who of Paddling Studmos: Fisher, Corran Addison, Nico Chassing, Mikey Abbot, Ken Whiting, Brendan Mark--and that doesn’t even include the U.S. contingent. Then consider that Gavere and Wright place no better than 16th and 17th; former World Champion Whiting settles for 19th; and Addison, who placed third two years earlier, finishes a paltry 37th ("I refused to do cartwheels," he says later, defending a ride only of loops. "I already got a silver and a bronze, so it was number one or nothing").

"They’re all incredible paddlers at this point," continues Benedict from his balcony. "You have to have a great ride to make it into the top five." Paddlers also have to adapt to a changing format each step of the way. Where the preliminaries combine scores from both rides and the quarter-finals count two out of three, tonight’s heat would allow two rides, but only count one. In the finals, five paddlers would go head-to-head with one ride each, with the loser each round getting eliminated. "There are different strategies for all of them," he adds. "Tonight means you go big--you don’t have to rely on both scores.

"The key," he adds, as if grooming me for the finals, "is remaining relaxed and calm. A lot of people start worrying too early. It’s the biggest event of two years and you have to control that excitement." Today the nerves are even harder to control. The men’s semi-finals, which will whittle the field from 15 to five, won’t start until 10:30 p.m., giving the remaining competitors all day to think about it. Benedict’s solution: a three-hour nap in the afternoon.

No one should feel this pressure more than Wick, the reigning champ. After leaving Benedict’s balcony, I find him alone at the top of the park steps eating a strawberry crepe. He looks relaxed, and I ask him about the pressure. "I like the position," he says, casually. "I get a chance to repeat, which no one has done before. In New Zealand there was tons of pressure because I dumped everything on credit cards to get there. Now I have sponsors--WaveSport, Chevy, Teva, Bomber Gear. I’ve got good vibes, but a lot of people could win. The top 15 is sick."

After watching the junior and men’s C-1 semi-finals later that afternoon, in which the U.S. made further steps toward its sweep, I realize I’d rather be boating than spectating (and if that’s the case, it hits me that the rodeo craze is succeeding in growing the sport). Borrowing a Dagger Ego from the demo court, I head upstream and find myself sharing an eddy with reigning squirt champ Andy Beddingfield, Brooke Winger and Arnd Schaftlein (here from Germany for the squirt division, even though he hasn’t been in a squirt boat for five years). Even when practicing, everyone cheers good rides and pushes each other on. For me, it means a spin or end here and there. For them, a dizzying array of acrobatics.

After returning to the hotel, and, like everyone else, garnering scowls from Jacque who has to mop the tile floor dry after people drip into their rooms, I run into Blakeney downstairs, who barely made the cut at 14th. "The energy of the competition is what gets you going," he says. "You just have to feed off of it." I follow him to the boatyard, separated from the pool by a shoulder-high hedge, where he takes a heat gun to his EZ to squish the ends. "I only weigh 145 pounds," he says. "I get tired after 45 seconds throwing this thing around. This should make it a little slicier." No matter that he’d be competing tonight in a boat that handled completely differently. He’d deal.

He then asks me if I saw the juniors today. If the cut to 15 for the men was impressive, the junior division was even more so. "They’re rippin’ it up as much as we are," he says. Wick walks over from the pool, catching the tail end of our conversation. "We’ve got one more year that we can hide from them," says Wick. If there’s a telling truth about this year’s Worlds, it’s that the juniors are right on the men’s heels. For the first time ever, there’s even a junior women’s category, about which no one is more psyched than the junior men. Though they blend in with the men on the water, however, the juniors are easier to spot on the streets. Most are surrounded by their families, who used their berth on the team as an excuse for a trip to Spain. Parents, siblings, uncles and aunts accompany each one until they’re able to ditch them at the bars.

The night competition throws the competitors’ balance off. They’ve had to wait all day. While everyone else has been tossing back beers, the 15 remaining paddlers try to stay pumped up while watching the crowd fill the stands. A shirtless EJ walks toward his gear and I wish him luck with a high five. With a choreographed routine much like a gymnast’s floor exercise--that includes an entry wave wheel into a loop into left cartwheels into right cartwheels into splitwheels--I somehow feel he doesn’t need it.

Over the crowd, all I can see of his ride are flashes of water spiraling through the lights. I know it is a good one. Wick struggles on his second run, washing out of the hole, but his first one is good enough to make the final five. Joining them in the finals will be Bryan Kirk, also of the U.S., and France’s Nico Chassing and David Arnaud. Despite the late hour, no one wants to leave. Canada’s Billy Harris showboats for the crowd with a ride that swaps his helmet off, and EJ returns sans paddle. Only when the lights go out does the crowd disperse. On the boardwalk, French fans--with two of their own in the finals--bang on drums and sing as if their country had just won the World Cup. Fireworks explode from the bridge. Police direct traffic as elderly locals look on in amusement. After everyone leaves, one lone swirl remains in the now-darkened hole. It’s Dan Gavere, throwing a few coulda’-woulda’-shoulda’-wheels after being ousted. No competitors, no spectators. Just him and the hole.

At the bar afterward, Andrew Holcombe drowns his sorrows. He placed seventh, missing the cut by 20 points. "I needed another variety point," he says. "I don’t think they gave me my loop." The next morning, I stick my head out the window and see Wick talking to some people by the pool. The finals for all classes start in another two hours and he is clearly excited. "The worst I can do right now is fifth," he says, pumping his fist into the air. "Yes, yes, yes!" I put on my gear and head out for a quick play session, where I run into Erica Mitchell and Tanya Shuman warming up before heading down to the women’s finals. Both look relaxed and poised. Erica looks particularly calm. And why shouldn’t she? She didn’t even know she was going to compete until she got a call from Blakeney saying that Aleta Miller had hurt her shoulder. As first alternate, she was on a plane to Barcelona that afternoon. "I was in an RV in Durango when the cell phone rang," she says. "It was almost like I was dreaming." One boat away from making the U.S. Slalom Team, her slalom regime apparently kept her in rodeo shape. An hour later she would capture the crown, beating out England’s Deb Pinneger and Canada’s Anna Levesque.

With only the men’s finals remaining, the U.S. knows it has a chance to win it all. Throughout the week, the team displayed an air of assuredness, an inner confidence born from having solid boaters in every class. Victories by Kennon and Helbert in the canoe classes, Brenna Kelleher in Junior Women, Jesse Murphy in Junior Men, Andy Beddingfield in Men’s Squirt, and Mitchell in Women’s K-1 set the stage for an historic finish.

Before the finals, EJ strolls the bank, shirtless once more baring his tell-tale physique. I ask him about his strategy with the culmination of two years’ work less than an hour away. He shrugs. "I just always try to score the highest number of points I can," he says. With points awarded for specific moves as well as a multiplier kicking in for variety, he adds that he has a double-or-nothing bet with Blakeney that he can score an 800-point ride. His highest so far: 581.

An hour later it comes down to a tale of two Erics: Wick and EJ. Either one would leave with a second World Championship, Wick retaining his crown from New Zealand and EJ regaining it after an eight-year absence. Screenwriters couldn’t have scripted a better ending: the reigning champ vs. EJ, who has been dominating events all season. The whole season, the whole two years, would boil down to one 45-second ride.

Though EJ has consistently posted the highest scores in the competition, on the second-to-last ride--which eliminated Bryan Kirk--Wick edges him out, meaning EJ has to go first. "You never want to win the second-to-last round," says C-1 champion Kennon, sitting next to me. "If you go first, you can let it all out without worrying about what the other guy did. It puts the pressure on the other guy."

Flashing his trademark peace sign to the crowd, EJ drops into his patented entry move: a wavewheel into a loop. But he misses the loop part and realigns his routine to add it in later. Wick exhales deeply in the eddy, waiting for another mistake to capitalize on. But EJ keeps the same composure that earned him top scores throughout the Championships. I can’t decide whom to root for. EJ is clearly the sentimental favorite, having caught a bad surge that kept him out of the finals in New Zealand, yet Wick is every bit his equal.

After EJ exits to the eddy, he claps as Wick ferries into the hole. Wick sticks his loop and swaps each direction effortlessly. When he is done, all eyes turn toward the scoreboard, which, thanks to Lluis’s computer science skills, instantly processes competitors’ scores. A sort of poetic justice is served as EJ--like Ray Borque finally winning the Stanley Cup--takes the crown.

"The whole thing played out quite nicely," EJ says later, after being carried on teammates’ shoulders at the disco. "I never quite got the ride I was looking for, but I knew that as long as I stayed in the hole, my scores would be high. I just rearranged the order of moves a little bit." As the only person to ever win two World Championships in men’s kayak--and by securing the final ingredient for the U.S.’s sweep--he also rearranged, for the time being anyway, the pecking order of paddlers in the world. In the end, the U.S. swept the top three spots in junior and men’s K-1, and earned 15 total medals in eight events.

The last time EJ won, in 1993 on the Ocoee, he admits rodeo was a different game. The level of competition was still high, he says, but now it’s way above where it’s ever been. It took a 13th-place showing in ’95, a second-place finish in ’97 and a 9th-place result in ’99 for him to regain the title. "Everyone thought I’d win in New Zealand, but I didn’t even make the finals," he adds. "It was kind of depressing. Things just went my way this time."

Most agree that a lot of it is the luck of the draw. "The ball bounced in my direction at the right time," says Kennon. "There were four guys out there today who could have won." Adds Benedict: "It’s not necessarily the best paddler, but who’s the best that day." Showing maturity beyond his chocolate-spread ways, Junior Champion Murphy sums it up this way: "The way I look at it, today I was World Champion. Any other day it could have been anyone else."

Sportsmanship aside, few can argue that EJ didn’t deserve to win, or that the entire U.S. team isn’t at the forefront of the international paddling scene. Fewer still can argue that rodeo isn’t here to stay, as it encourages all of us to push ourselves just a little harder.

Having watched the world’s best rip it up for a week, the next morning I test this theory by taking advantage of the hole’s only opening in days. Floating down to the event site, I turn and see EJ waving from the bridge. Borrowing his trademark, I grin and flash him a peace sign. Exhausted and barely dry from the previous two weeks, I bet my boat (or the one I borrowed from Gavere) that he’s thinking of going in for another play session just for fun--and that the whole U.S. team will likely be right behind him.

--The 2003 World Kayak Freestyle Championships will be held on the Graz River in Austria. Book your seats early.