All in the Same Boat: Competition includes whitewater sprint, rodeo, squirt, wave and extreme slalom complete with committing seal launch. Competitors all used the same model of boat for each discipline. Scores are weighted and totalled.

An Offer He Can’t Refuse: Germany’s Jan Kellner, nicknamed the “Godfather of Rodeo” becomes the first world freestyle champion and is still considered the most successful rodeo paddler in Europe. Kellner goes on to design the revolutionary Diablo for Eskimo. 

Stunt Boating: The event was called the World Stunt Boat Championships. “We’d been calling events ‘rodeos,’ and figured that it would confuse anyone who wasn’t familiar with kayaking,” says Middleton. One of stunt boating’s big moves is to stand up and sit down while front surfing. 

The generation that created the river industry, and much of paddling as we know it today, is greying. After 30 some years and the switch from canvas packs to barrels, retirement is just around the next bend. As the paddling guide industry faces the end of an era, I thought we should look back—something we’re just too young to have done before.

Mountaineers can point to 1899 when the Canadian Pacific Railroad hired two Swiss mountain guides to operate out of its glacier house hotel, starting a long and distinguished tradition of recreational mountain travel. Rivers, on the other hand, have been travelled since the beginning.

For several hundred years first nation guides were the cornerstone of European exploration of the continent. Voyageur guides picked up where they left off by driving the fur trade up and down the waterways, to be replaced by logging’s river drive foremen. guides yes, but the purpose was cartography, furs and lumber, not recreation as we know commercial river guiding today.

Rather than being born, recreational river guiding spawned and hatched slowly. sometime in the 1800s fishing guides, relying on the canoe, began tak- ing paying clients into the wilderness. At the same time, summer canoe camps came into existence, building their programs around canoe tripping and skilled trip leaders. simultaneously the opening of the west’s rivers, such as the colora- do, created an enamoured public and capable boatmen looking for post-exploration employment. Across the continent scruffily bearded, young adventurers started scratching out a living by guiding others down rivers.

By the late 1960s and early ’70s, buoyed by summer canoe camp graduates, advancing gear, huge numbers of then-young baby boomers and an emerging environmental awareness, canoe outfitters and whitewater rafting businesses sprang up everywhere. they grew from backyard sheds into what is now substantial business—adventure tourism.

Operating Black Feather out of his mother’s basement, in 1971 wally schaber was on the leading edge of river-based adventure tourism. Then, $700 would get you several weeks on the nahanni, where schaber was the first licensed canoe guide. “We were cheap and there were a lot of young boomers with some skills. we offered them adventure. At the time, running whitewater was considered pretty extreme,” remembers schaber with a chuckle. Now that same Nahanni trip costs $5,500.

In retrospect the baby boom makes everything sound easy. but really, the intervening 35 years—between basements and big business—the pioneer guide services had to literally create paddling in the minds of the public. The Nahanni and Colorado rivers, if heard of at all, sounded mysterious and dangerous. whitewater rafts and kayaks were unheard of. Spending good money on a river trip as a vacation was a new idea and not an easy sell. 

The buzz coming out of the last World Freestyle Championships in Australia was the changes in the scoring system and the structure of the event made with an eye to freestyle becoming an olympic sport. Rules were changed to encourage more variety of moves and a World Cup series now replaces an off year Pre-Worlds event. According to the International freestyle committee, freestyle kayaking could be in the olympics as early as 2012 and they say, a large step in the right direction.

I just checked the website of London’s Olympic Delivery Authority. It is moving forward with plans for a new whitewater canoe slalom course at broxbourne, which will serve as the host venue for the london 2012 Olympic Games. There was, however, no mention of freestyle kayaking on the list of demonstration sports for 2012, nor was there mention of the slalom course including a monster-sized wave most North American athletes say is the real future of freestyle.

Even with whitewater freestyle now under the wing of the International paddling events—I doubt they have deep enough pockets in their train- ing shells to bribe the Ioc into accepting our fringe sport into their olympic Games. And even if the IFC was drop-shipping kayaks full of greenbacks, does anyone really think that host cities like London are going to build a Bus Eater wave? Not a chance.

If whitewater freestyle does make it to the Olympics, athletes would surely be competing in manmade pour-overs or flushy little waves at the bottom of concrete slalom courses, like main Wave at the Penrith Olympic Stadium, home to the poorly attended Worlds in 2005 and the target of much criticism.

So, you have freestyle athletes and boat designers driving the sport toward bigger, more awesome waves they say best showcases the sport. meanwhile, the competitive organizing committee is setting the groundwork for freestyle to qualify for the Olympics, something that would surely set the sport back in the hole by 10 years.

Either no one has noticed this crazy contradiction or the olympic dream is really about pro athletes accessing funds from national sport associations and government agencies, not about moving the sport forward at all. Which is fine with me, but with every other olympic athlete making public statements about their under-funded national sports programs, I can’t help but wonder if it’s worth it.

Personally, I’m all for whitewater freestyle in the Olympics. I’d buy back my Wave Sport XXX and practice my spins, cartwheels, splits, cleans and blunts on my local river. If I link them all together on the right day I may find myself on a plane to London to make my country proud. 

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2007 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.