They began as a gang of teenage kids from canoeing families who met after school every day on a turbulent stretch of the Potomac River a few miles upstream from the nation`s capital. In the beginning, all they wanted was fun. Quickly outgrowing the possibilities of open canoes, they began decking over their canoes to make them more fit for white water and building their own kayaks. Those who watched them from the riverbank wondered how they could live amid the boil of water below the Great Falls of the Potomac. The kids spent endless afternoons there in boats that were no more than tiny slips of plastic or fiber glass glued together with epoxy and seemingly as vulnerable as a raindrop held together by surface tension.
A skilled paddler, though, can ride one on a wave as big as a bull elephant and then turn a somersault by driving the little boat into a wave until it flips over backward. The kids called the somersaults ”enders” and competed to see who could do the best and most.
Over the last decade that gang of river rats from Maryland and Virginia has revolutionized world white-water racing. They took the United States from a position of oblivion to one of dominance in slalom racing and transformed boat design, training methods and strategy. Today the Feeder Canal where they train on the Potomac River has become a mecca for world paddlers, who fly in to share the competition, fellowship and hard work that characterize the U.S. white-water team. Many of the original gang live near one another within a few minutes` walk to the river in a tiny community called Brookmont just outside the District of Columbia.
One of the group is Jon Lugbill, 26, who has a chance this July to compile the greatest white-water slalom-racing record in the history of the sport. If he wins, as he well could, his eighth and ninth gold medals at the World Championships in Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, July 9-19, he will be the first person to do so. The only racer considered strong enough to stop him is his fellow river rat, longtime rival and friend, David Hearn, 28, who himself has five World Championship gold medals in slalom racing. The two have personalities as different as opposite lobes of the same brain, one bringing aggression and the other caution to their common objective of winning at the World Championships.
Working out on a cool, rainy evening, a bareheaded Lugbill, his brown hair long enough to curl over the high neck of his paddling jacket, drives his C-1 boat upstream near the shore with short, savage strokes. A C-1 is like a small kayak, in which the paddler kneels instead of sits as he uses a single- bladed paddle, switching sides but not hands as he paddles with it. Lugbill comes to the head of the rapids and pauses in a protected eddy, checking the stopwatch strapped to the deck of the C-1. At the right moment he digs in his paddle, and the C-1 surges into the fast water.
In championship competition, slalom racers loop down a course of 600 meters, passing through 25 pairs of poles, or gates, suspended above the water. Green gates are run downstream, red ones upstream. The goal is to run fast and clean, or free of penalties. A running time is recorded, and penalties are added: 5 seconds for touching a gate, 50 seconds for missing one entirely or running it in the wrong direction. The final score is the better of two runs.
Training this evening are eight paddlers, nearly all candidates for the U.S. team. Lugbill`s style stands out even against such competition. He radiates aggression. The long arms reach out to ram the paddle into the water. The face juts forward, the strong nose resembling a beak, and the shoulders hunch like a raptor about to strike its prey. Lugbill doesn`t so much paddle over waves as split them apart.
One stroke smashes him across the current. The next whips the boat into an eddy, where he catches the reversing current with a probing stroke on the other side of the boat. He works the paddle like a Mixmaster, pivoting the boat upstream. Another switch of sides and another stroke, and the boat drives through the gate at the head of an eddy, Lugbill`s body twisting and his head thrown back to escape the touch of the twin poles, the motion imitating ecstasy. A final stroke sends him back into the current, his eyes already searching out the next gate. All this takes less than three seconds.
In a few minutes Hearn takes his turn at the rapids` head. In contrast to Lugbill, he exudes serenity. A straight mustache crosses his round, pleasant face. He sits calmly and apparently unmoved as the water lashes at his boat with tongues of foam. He strokes with practiced grace, his paddle a living connection between him and the water. Coming upon a wave, he turns the power of the river to his use. He pauses, gauges the moment when the lip of the wave will shove him forward, and pounces. Hearn`s paddling imposes a sense of orderliness on the tumult around him, leaving the water behind him momentarily calmed by his passing.
At the end of several runs only a fraction of a second separates the pair on a course that takes about two minutes. Their closest competitor is nearly 10 seconds back. It seems the evening will end that way until Lugbill opens up a blazing run and burns four full seconds off his time. Hearn, who has a sore shoulder and has been trying to loosen it up between runs by winding it like a windmill, decides not to test it to the fullest yet and leaves early. The evening`s competition closes with Lugbill on top. Night and the rain close in, and the river goes dark.
Seven miles upriver from the White House, George Washington built an inlet for a canal he hoped would one day carry the commerce of the new nation from the backwoods to the marketplace. Today a half-mile of his Feeder Canal that remains carries a new American revolution. It is here that the U.S. White-water Team trains morning and evening, in rain, snow or the gagging humidity of a Washington heat wave.
In the 1970s a serious American paddler had to travel to Europe to learn the craft of high-speed slalom paddling. Today the Europeans come to the Feeder Canal. According to William Endicott, 41, the unpaid, full-time coach of the U.S. Whitewater Team, the canal has great advantages as a training site. It is accessible; the paddlers need to carry their boats only a few hundred yards from Brookmont to be on the water. It was cut deep, so even in the low water of summer, paddles do not scrape bottom. The slower water near its shore makes it easy to paddle back upstream, so training can be done on a continuous circuit.
It was here that Endicott and the team developed the now-famous ”five-on-five” workout. A decade ago Europeans trained for the slalom by paddling long distances at below top speed. The American team did short runs but went all out. ”In the beginning it was just more fun that way,” says Endicott.
”Nobody realized at first what the benefits would be.” The workout then evolved into a short slalom course run as fast as possible five times, then a new course for five more runs until five different sets of gates are completed. The exercise trained the athletes to paddle flat out, building explosive power rather than endurance. ”Now you can go into a boathouse in Italy or someplace and see `5×5` chalked up on the board,” Endicott says.
”Everybody does it.”
Other training principles grew out of the group`s desire for fun, the constant competition and what Endicott calls ”the ethic of cooperation.” You competed, but you helped each other.
Most paddlers train alone. But the young Virginians and Marylanders created a lifestyle around competing against each other. ”I try to look at it, if I beat Jon, I`ve won the World Championships,” says Hearn. ”The hard part is getting along with each other when you`re competing. The way we do it, you`ve always got another shot at it; there`s not just one chance to prove yourself, like in a race.”
Cathy Hearn, David`s sister and a world champion in kayak slalom, says the cooperation grew out of the sport and the way the children were raised.
”If a person`s tipped over, you may laugh for a couple of seconds, but you`re going to get that person out of the river,” Cathy says. ”They would do the same for you.” The Lugbills and the Hearns were ”brought up to never beat on each other.”
Endicott, who speaks five languages, picked up another training principle, that of ”time in the boat,” from an East German defector. Paddlers find the muscle usage of their sport nearly impossible to duplicate with exercise machines or weights, though European paddlers a decade ago devoted much of their training to lifting weights and running. The defector disclosed that the East Germans, leaders in the sport, emphasized actual paddling. This appealed to the Americans. ”We didn`t want to spend time in some stuffy gym with weights,” says Cathy Hearn.
So Endicott`s group took up year-round paddling. Even in the worst weather, they ran slalom courses in the David Taylor Model Basin, a three-quarter-mile-long indoor pool near Brookmont that the U.S. Navy uses for wave tests on boat designs. Virtually no one else in the sport paddled 12 months a year. Even now, Endicott gets occasional hate mail from other American paddlers who think he has made the sport ”elitist.” ”They think they should be able to paddle just on the weekends and make the U.S. team,”
Endicott says. ”But it`s not like that anymore.”
Paddling, in fact, has changed for everyone. A decade ago the Hearns and the Lugbills paddled as a ”family thing.” Hearn remembers his first family canoeing trip down the Missouri River in Montana, when he and his sister Cathy, two future world champions, sat in the middle of the boat with the supplies. ”We had our little paddles, but we didn`t paddle a whole lot,” he remembers. ”We`d drag our paddles and check out the whirlpools.”
Lugbill recalls getting interested in racing at age 9. ”I went out to a race in West Virginia and just watched and thought it was really neat,” he says. He, his two brothers and father all became involved. ”We got some people to loan us a boat and liked it,” Lugbill says.
The parents watched their children`s growing attachment to a sport in which the participants sometimes are upside down underwater, their skulls threatened by rocks, their lives by dangerous currents. But to the parents, it seemed more wholesome than the drug scene then beginning to engulf suburban teenagers. ”I saw it as a wonderful, exciting adventure,” says Mary Alice Hearn, David and Cathy`s mother. ”But we taught them they didn`t have to do it unless it was fun. If there wasn`t passion in it, don`t do it.” The parents provided boats, a garage to build more boats, a car pool to get to the river, support at races and other services. ”There was nothing we could do to stop them after a point,” Mary Alice Hearn says.
Endicott has found from interviews with every top paddler in the world a common pattern of parental support. What marks the paddlers of the Potomac is group support and identity. Lugbill admits the group began to feel a ”little superior” as they headed together for white water every day instead of the neighborhood five-and-dime for a Coke. Cathy Hearn remembers: ”We`d go out after school every day and just hang out until dark. Sometimes we were in our boats, and sometimes we weren`t. Sometimes we were just clambering around on the rocks looking for flowers. The guys are going to say that only I did that and they didn`t, but there was a certain amount of it on all sides.”
The youngsters even had their own club, the Little Falls Wildwater Club, or LFWC. It was the ”renegade club” because all the kids and their parents were members of the Canoe Cruisers Association, the Washington-based regional paddling club that is the largest in the nation. The CCA represented the establishment; LFWC was their form of adolescent rebellion. ”We`d race for LFWC in some of the small races, not the big ones,” Lugbill says. ”Just enough to get a few people angry.”
The young paddlers began to work for bigger goals after a Maryland paddler, Jamie McEwan, won a bronze medal in C-1 in the 1972 Olympics.
(That is the only time that white-water paddling has been an Olympic sport because white-water courses are difficult to provide and the events difficult to judge. In the 1972 Olympics white-water events required 125 officials, more than for any other sport, who had to decide whether a racer had passed through a gate forward or backward and whether the whole torso had cleared the gate. Since then, all gates can be run either forward or backward, and only the paddler`s head needs to clear the gates, eliminating the most difficult judgment calls. The host city for the
1992 Summer Olympic Games, Barcelona, Spain, has asked that white-water events again be included.)
That solitary Olympic medal fired up the Potomac paddlers. ”We were young, and we could dream anything real quick,” Lugbill says. Their games turned serious.
In 1975 Lugbill, then 14, went to the World Championships as part of a C- 2 boat team with his brother, Ron, two years his senior. Racing in a C-2 boat, a decked canoe with two cockpits, usually requires years of coordinated training. Lugbill acknowledges that he and Ron were not great paddlers then, but they saw the world`s top paddlers in action and thought they could take them. Since then, both have become world champions.
Two years later Endicott showed up at a slalom race at a local swimming pool. ”He said he wanted to do some coaching,” Hearn remembers. Endicott blends a serious, intellectual side with boyish enthusiasm for sport. He rowed at Harvard, where he earned a master`s degree in public administration, and still keeps his great-uncle`s Harvard oar mounted above his fireplace. He was a national paddling champion in C-2 and a member of the U.S. white-water team. For a while he worked for several congressmen and the prestigious Democratic Study Group, a congressional think-tank on Capitol Hill, but gave that up to devote full time to coaching for free and writing books on white-water racing. In 1980 Endicott`s father died and left him a modest inheritance. The untimely death and his experience on Capitol Hill–including the sight of a youngish colleague being rolled out of his office on an ambulance stretcher after a heart attack–convinced him to take up a more physical life.
He has become as obsessed with coaching as the paddlers have with paddling, calling them and himself the ”Feeder Fanatics.” In the last seven years he produced four books detailing the secrets of the training methods that brought about U.S. dominance in slalom canoe racing. Paddlers have said that even without him, they would have won medals individually, but all acknowledge that he forged a group of champions. His books and international outlook have made it possible for the best training methods to spread rapidly in what traditionally has been a secretive, jealous world.
”In my day you had to spend 10 years learning,” says Endicott. ”You`d figure it out, win and then leave the sport. Then everybody had to start all over again.”
Before Endicott came on the Potomac River scene, the group had had no great victories. The year he arrived, Lugbill and Hearn both failed to make the U.S. team in slalom racing for the World Championships, which are held every two years. But the group knew they could win, and as they raced each other every day, their times kept dropping.
Endicott remembers a Feeder Canal workout when Hearn at first put together a series of clean, fast runs, even though Lugbill wasn`t there to fire him up. Then his times failed to improve–until Lugbill appeared on the bank and plunked his C-1 on the water. Between the two of them they soon lowered the best time for the 70-second course by a full two seconds.
”We don`t bore holes in each other`s boats, but it`s pretty cutthroat,” Hearn says of their friendly rivalry. ”We were the first ones who were speed freaks,” Lugbill says.
Almost everyone on the U.S. team who went to the 1979 World Championships in Jonquiere, Quebec, trained on the Feeder Canal, and they knew they were the first Americans to have a shot at gold medals in international competition. The U.S. had had no team entered in the World Championships until 1957. Not until 1967, when a woman took a ninth place, did an American for the first time place in the top 10 in some category. But 1979 was different.
”My best memory is us doing courses at Jonquie re and seeing people we thought would be our competition running down the course watching us, really impressed,” Lugbill says. ”That says it all, when your competition is sitting there with its mouth wide open on the bank and it`s a week before the race. You know you got `em.”
With Lugbill taking first and Hearn second, the U.S. team won all three medals plus a fifth place in C-1. It was the first medals sweep by a single nation in that class. Among the women, Cathy Hearn placed first, and a teammate third in kayak. The U.S. also won the team competition, in which three C-1s go down a run, basically in a line, at the same time.
The victories brought elation; the realities of the sport came later.
”Six months later, maybe a year later, we knew we were not in a rich sport,” says Lugbill, whose greatest moment of national recognition came in 1986, when he replaced Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton on the Wheaties cereal box. ”You win the World Championships and you`re not going to be famous and you`re not going to get a lot of money, hardly any,” Lugbill says. ”The day after the Worlds, I`d just won and hardly slept all night. I got out there, I had to race again, and my brother said, `Hey, I hear you`re going to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.` And I said, `Really?` He said, `No, you idiot, you only won the World Championships in C-1.” Lugbill still is waiting for his first Sports Illustrated cover.
After 1979 the top world competition narrowed to Lugbill and Hearn, who have traded off first and second places ever since, including the first place won by Hearn in 1985. Although Hearn has been a consistent winner in the U.S. nationals, he has not been picked to adorn a Wheaties box.
Many of the old gang left paddling behind with adolescence, dropping out to take up careers and families. They stay in touch, though, ”more like siblings than friends,” Cathy Hearn says. Those who remain live the
semimonastic life of the amateur sportsman, supporting themselves with odd jobs. A construction company owned by an older paddler has employed most of the U.S. Whitewater Team off and on.
Hearn, who like his sister and Lugbill has finished college, lives frugally on money from endorsements of racing equipment and a private fund for paddlers. Lugbill works as a manager for Appalachian Outfitters, a local retailer. Cathy Hearn, who has waited tables and hired herself out as a human guinea pig for tests at the National Institutes of Health, works for a greeting-card company owned by a slalom enthusiast to support herself and her husband, also a paddler.
Building their own boats, eating simple foods and living in plain rented rooms, this group of paddlers is following a path so Spartan it could almost be a religious order. In the quest for excellence in their chosen sport, they are sacrificing now, as their parents earlier had sacrificed for them. Although champions even in such noncommercial sports as swimming and gymnastics are rewarded with millions of dollars from endorsements, paddling champions must sustain themselves with the sheer satisfaction of achieving in their sport.
To the Potomac group, the competition and their ethic of cooperation are especially important. ”Sometimes I wish he would go away, but that`s a selfish feeling,” Hearn says of Lugbill. ”If he weren`t around, the training would be a lot harder. I would hold it against him if he didn`t go all out, because it wouldn`t push me. We work together on a lot of things. We work together on the boats.”
Since 1976 the two have designed a series of high-performance boats that have become international standards. They call them the ”Max” series, as in the old teenage phrase, ”going to the max.” Because their sport is so little known, they started the series with ”Max II” to give the impression they are building on a tradition.
What they are actually building upon are the great changes in materials and design that have made the C-1 and the kayak racing boats look much alike. A decade ago the C-1 looked like a plump decked canoe. The Potomac paddlers began lowering the height of the C-1 deck to allow them to ”sneak” under gates and began making the boats ever smaller and lighter. David Hearn then developed a C-1 that weighed only 11 pounds, an expensive model that was so fragile it could be raced only a few times.
Considering these efforts excessive, officials imposed new rules requiring that a white-water racing boat weigh at least 10 kilograms and be at least 4 meters long and seven-tenths of a meter wide. In U.S. terms, that means a boat weighing at least 22 pounds and having a minimum length of slightly over 13 feet and width of slightly over 2 feet. The paddlers, however, keep pushing the limits. Hearn and Lugbill`s latest C-1 and kayak boats have batlike wings a few inches out from the hull, fulfilling official requirements for width but allowing a narrower and more maneuverable bottom.
While Hern and Lugbill cooperate on many things, their friendship has limits. ”I wouldn`t say we`re best friends; we can`t share everything,”
Hearn says. ”I wouldn`t want to just sit down and talk with Jon about my strategy for the year. But basically we know what the other guy`s strategy is. It`s to win. If I`m having trouble with something, I`d ask Jon how he did it. We don`t have to say that much to understand.”
Even their bodies have similarities. Both stand 5 feet 9 inches tall. Though Lugbill outweighs Hearn by 10 pounds at 175, both are within the limits for the ideal slalom racer`s build–not too big to slow the boat but with the muscle for rapid paddling over and over again. The tops of Lugbill`s feet have grown ugly, tumorlike knobs from constant rubbing against boat bottoms. Hearn`s back muscles are so developed they give him a hump, and his left shoulder droops in a permanent paddling position.
The two are consistently on the U.S. three-boat team that has won every World Championship team event since 1979, a record and testament to the years they have spent training together.
”In team, there`s a kind of invisible string linking the boats together,” Hearn says. ”You want to keep that string as short as possible. I basically have my bow just behind Jon`s body, but we`re in control and we`re not going to screw up. Sometimes the boats are so close together there`s hardly any room in between for a paddle stroke.”
Lugbill says his relationship with Hearn ”fluctuates, depending on how things are going. Before 1979 we didn`t get along very well. I was a little more radical, go for it no matter what. He was a little more cautious, conservative. We both came toward the middle. We have the same goals, the same desires, we think along the same lines. We share a major part of our lives. This year we`re not out there as much together anymore. He`s been hurt and a little sick the past couple of weeks. We`re starting to go our separate ways a little bit, not a lot.”
The old group has begun to split apart, and new faces have come in. Cathy Hearn, now 29, trains in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, Lecky Haller, also a World Champion paddler. Another old ”rat” bought a seat on the Australian stock market; another just participated in a tropical rain-forest conference in Tokyo. The group looks on them, too, as success stories. Those who have stuck it out come together for races, as they do on a recent weekend for a big spring race on the Potomac. Heavy rains, however, raise the water level so high that the National Park Service forbids any racing there. At the last minute the race is switched to the Savage River in Maryland, the planned site of the 1989 Whitewater World Championships, the first ever to be held in the U.S.
A hard core of paddlers heads out from Brookmont at 7 a.m. in cars loaded with wire, cord and gates for a three-hour drive into the Appalachian Mountains near the Cumberland Gap, where the Savage roars down a narrow gorge to join the headwaters of the Potomac. They work until early afternoon stringing the wires across the river from which the gates are set. By midday the sun breaks through the heavy clouds, transforming the Savage from a sullen cataract into a torrent of shimmering crystal. The paddlers make practice runs until dark, when they withdraw to the campsite along the riverbank, now cluttered with cars, tents and boats.
From the backs of cars spills out a jumble of duct tape, faded paddling jackets, pile clothing and helmets. Paddling gear hangs dripping wet from lines or propped-up paddles. As necessity wins out over privacy, the women wiggle under towels to scrunch out of their rubbery river gear, while the men casually half-strip in the open. Few cook. Most drive into the nearby town of Luke for a quick meal, getting back early to sleep in the cars or in tents. A lone paddler tends an open fire under the starry night. No radios blare. Nobody parties.
At dawn, Lugbill`s golden retriever, Jasper, makes a round of wake-up calls among the tents. A few cars head back to Luke for breakfast, but most paddlers have brought their own orange juice, cereal, yogurt and other quickie foods.
The race, scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m., is late as expected, and no one seems upset. ”We`re a little shorthanded, so everybody`s going to have to do something,” Kevin Sessler, a paddler and race organizer, tells the 35 contestants at 11 a.m. Paddlers draw assignments as gate judges and starters. No TV crew and no other reporter are there to cover the world-caliber event. There is no grandstand. Except for family and friends, the only other spectators are two worm fishermen dropping their lines in the eddies at the edge of the river.
Shortly after noon Lugbill takes his place as the first racer to go down the course. Hearn has stayed in Brookmont to rest his shoulder, but even without his rival there to press him, Lugbill goes flat out, holding back neither effort nor spirit nor skill to run fast and clean. ”This is going to be the best race of the year,” says Endicott, admiring the high water and the sunshine. ”It doesn`t get any better than this.” Afterward, Endicott wonders: ”Would Lugbill have run faster if Hearn had been there? Can Hearn, with his sore shoulder, still rival Lugbill?”
Two weeks later the U.S. Whitewater Team Trials on the West River in Jamaica, Vt., turn into a classic Hearn-Lugbill duel. After the first run, Lugbill leads by 15 seconds, an enormous gap. Hearn is still favoring his injured shoulder. In the next run, Hearn for the first time in many weeks goes flat out, driving himself and his boat down a course so difficult both champions comment on it beforehand. One series of gates in particular trips up racer after racer. A paddler must drive up into a little pocket of water above a near-waterfall, negotiate an upstream gate, then cross to another upstream gate across the heaviest water. Many get washed downstream, missing gates entirely and taking 50-second penalties per gate. Most who do make the gates cannot avoid hitting them for 5-second penalties each.
Hearn slips through clean. The shoulder holds. He shaves a second off Lugbill`s best time.
After the runs, Lugbill changes into long underwear, jeans and sunglasses and begins helping reset the gates for the next day`s races. By finishing one- two, he and Hearn have assured themselves places on the four-man C-1 team. The other contenders now must fight for the two remaining spots. Lugbill looks composed. ”Yeah, he snuck one in on me there,” he says of the day`s rivalry. For Lugbill and Hearn, a life of trading the lead spot has brought a sense of serenity, a sureness that as long as they give their best against each other, they will stay on top in world competition. Their struggle for victory has brought no riches, but it has called out all that an athlete can bring to a moment in sport, the highest qualities of body, mind and spirit.
Neither one sees an end in sight of their supremacy, though both realize they cannot perform at such a high level forever. They know their careers may wind up sandwiched between two Olympics in which they first are too young to compete in one and then too old in the other. But experience as well as quick reflexes count in white-water racing, and their competitive careers conceivably might stretch out long enough for a 1992 Olympics. In any event, both are looking forward to the World Championships scheduled this month on the Ise re River at Bourg-Saint-Maurice in the French Alps as another step, another test, in a long line of challenges. ABC-TV considered covering the event, but finally decided not to. So the camera crews won`t be there, but for the two champions, it is enough to give their best for as long as they are the best.
