(dramatic synth music) (calm synth music) - [Canoeist] Most people like our sport when they see it.

The problem is they don't see it very often.

(upbeat synth music) - [Female Kayaker] There are a lot of those sports in the Olympics, and after the Olympics, you still don't hear that much about them.

There's optimal sports and we're one of them.

(upbeat synth music) - [Canoeist] Right now, I'm training for the Olympics.

I'm probably faster than I've ever been before.

I'm gonna try and find out how good I can get.

- [Canoeist] It's a big race, there's going to be a lot of pressure because the Olympics is the number one sporting event in the world.

(upbeat synth music) - [Announcer] It's the bronze medal and we have one of the few athletes that has a chance to paddle in both the '72 and the '92 Olympics in Barcelona.

They are in great sync together, very, very fast.

Oh, but they look great now, they're having a good run.

This is Jamie McEwan in the bow, Lecky Haller in the stern.

- [Narrator] White water slalom, two minutes of controlled fury on a raging river.

Paddling through a maze of red and green, their sleek craft, virtual extensions of their own bodies.

The best athletes are at one with the water, using every nuance of current and gravity to propel them faster toward the finish line.

This spectacular sport, long a favorite of Europeans, has remained relatively unnoticed in the United States.

Ironically, it is two Marylanders, Jon Lugbill and David Hearn, who have been world champions throughout the last decade.

(rushing water) The Savage, one of Maryland's premier whitewater rivers.

Renowned as the best natural, slalom course in the world, the Savage has hosted numerous international races, including the 1989 World Championships, the first time the prestigious worlds were ever held in the US.

(rushing water) - Yeah, I'm just gonna get up stream so I can look through-- (rushing water) Flag us.

- [Narrator] The home river of the US slalom team, the Savage has long been its' proven grounds, many times the site of team trials.

- [Interviewer] But you do want to tell us what can be done direct.

- [Canoeist] Yeah, I don't want the better guys to have to reverse 13 to get 14.

- But if you bring it up high, you can bring it over this way more, so they have a problem with hitting their stern on the eddy to make a drag.

- [Narrator] But this year the team trials have taken on a greater significance.

- I just remember in the fall, it was really hard to stick that upright, 'cause it dropped off quick.

But so what?

It's the Olympics.

- [Narrator] Over 100 athletes have gathered here vying for a spot on the 1992 Olympic whitewater team.

The stakes are high.

Many of them have been waiting their entire careers for a shot at white gold, for whitewater slalom hasn't been an Olympic event for 20 years.

- You're flying across that way.

It's like, whoa!

He started putting on the brakes, that's all you got to stop, you know?

- Yeah, yeah.

- [Narrator] Among the hopefuls is Jamie McEwan who won a spot on the 1972 team racing here on the Savage.

Now he's back again, looking for a second trip to the Olympics.

- [Jamie] Yeah, we want to make sure we don't go too soon.

- [Narrator] In whitewater slalom, athletes race against the clock through a series of 25 gates suspended just inches above the water.

The green gates are negotiated going downstream.

But for the red gates, the racer must turn and paddle upstream against the current.

If they hit a gate while paddling through it, a five-second penalty is added to the running time.

Missing a gate entirely counts as a 52nd penalty and means certain defeat in a sport where winners and losers are determined by fractions of a second.

Over a single stretch of rapids, the difficulty of the run lies in the placement of the slalom gates.

It's not just the river that challenges the athletes, it's also the design of the course.

Dave Mitchell's Olympic trials course is calculated to separate the best from the rest.

- [Dave] I make the moves hard because you can only make them easier, the jury can only make them easier.

I love to make a challenge and yet have it as fair as possible.

(timer beeping) [Announcer] Two, one, go!

- [Narrator] Racing in both canoes and kayaks, the competition is divided into four separate classes with medals in each class.

Though they may look similar, the boats are really quite different.

In the single canoe or C1, the paddler kneels in a decked canoe and uses a single-bladed paddle.

The two-man version, or double canoe, is called the C2.

Currently only men compete in these two classes.

In the kayak, or K1, the paddler sits with legs outstretched and uses a double-bladed paddle.

Both men and women compete in kayaks, each in separate classes.

The boats are built from high-tech materials, making them lightweight and tough.

(audience cheering) While whitewater slalom is a relatively new sport, it has changed radically over the past 20 years as equipment design and paddling techniques have improved.

Even as recently as 1972, the sport looked quite different.

That year, whitewater slalom made its first and only appearance as an Olympic event in Augsburg.

For the event, the Germans had built the world's first artificial whitewater course.

At a time when all the top racers were European, Jamie McEwan, the canoeist from Maryland, stunned the competition by winning a bronze medal in the single canoe class, the only American to date to win an Olympic medal in whitewater.

Jamie's feat inspired a new generation of Maryland paddlers who would radically change the face of the sport and go on to become international champions in the process.

And it all started as a quest for fun, fun on the Potomac.

(upbeat synth music) (upbeat synth music) (upbeat synth music) One of the fun seekers was Jon Lugbill.

Another was Davey Hearn.

- [Davey] We weren't really trying to go out and win the world championship or anything back then.

We were just having fun after school on the river.

(upbeat synth music) - [Jon] We had a group of about 20 kids here in the Washington area that were training pretty seriously.

We were paddling every day, but we didn't have any focus, we didn't have any direction, we didn't have like a real leader.

Bill fit that role.

- [Bill] Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.

- [Narrator] Bill Endicott, a Harvard college rower, discovered whitewater in the late sixties.

He's been the US whitewater team coach since 1977.

- I was a congressional aide at that point working on Capitol Hill.

And I had sort of said, well, my canoeing days are pretty much over now and I'm going to really get to work seriously.

And after a few months of doing that on Capitol Hill, anybody in his right mind starts to look around.

So I went and I met these guys.

I figured, gee, this is great.

I'll be involved in the strategies and schemes for winning races.

40.6.

- [Narrator] One strategy, redesign the boats.

- [Jon] Alright, so this is the new boat, huh.

- This is the new boat.

- Alright.

Barcelona bound.

Back in the Olympics in 1972, boats had higher ends than the middle because that was a requirement.

That rule was changed.

So I started into the sport when you could make the ends as low as you wanted.

- We got tired of being shown up by these kayakers.

They could sneak eighth and we could try and sneak it, and we'd go and hit the pole, and back then it was a ten-second penalty.

So we started to chop our boats down.

- Traditionally in America, you went with the design that was the latest and hottest thing that came out of Europe.

We changed all that starting in 1976, myself, David Hearn, Bob Robinson, we started making our own boats.

- [Bill] Cutting down the ends of the boats, they inadvertently discovered that they could also use the edge of the boat to knife underneath the water and do these pivot turns.

And that meant that suddenly now you could do these really fast turns that you could never do before.

That revolutionized the sport.

- [Narrator] At the 1979 World Championships in Jonqui�re, Canada, the new American canoes made their debut.

- Some of the people that we thought would be our main competitors were just following us down, running down the bank during practice, 'cause we were doing all these moves that they had never seen before.

All of a sudden we knew the race was between ourselves.

I won and I was 25 seconds ahead of the fastest European.

- Lugbill, Hearn, and Robinson swept the C1 class, winning the gold, silver, and bronze.

It was a big year for the Americans.

Cathy Hearn, Davey's sister, captured three gold medals in women's kayak.

They never looked back.

Jon and Davey finished first and second in six consecutive world championships, trading places only once in 1985, when Hearn took the title.

Between them, they've won 19 gold medals in international competition.

Yet with all of that gold and glory, the American public still refused to celebrate the sport, and it remained, out in the woods.

- The amount of publicity that I got in the sport was never, never really motivated me to compete.

In 1979, I just won the world championships and the next day, I'm like, high as a kite, and I'm just floating around, and my brother comes up to me, my brother Ron says, you're going to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

And I was like, yeah, yeah, cool!

Then he goes, no, that's just kidding.

I think Ron really drove it home that, no, you're a whitewater canoeist, you're not gonna be on the cover of Sports Illustrated, you're not going to be on national networks all the time.

So I think from day one, even though I had success, I realized that it was important for me to do it because that's what I wanted to do, and I wasn't doing it for other people, I was doing it for myself.

- [Narrator] Bethesda, Maryland had become the mecca for US whitewater racing.

The best lived and train there.

Dana Chladek is a two-time world champion silver medalist.

- After I graduated from college in '86, I went to Seattle to train there, thinking that there's great whitewater out there.

But I realized that you really need a good, strong group and a coach.

In D.C., everything's very centralized.

Just within minutes of my house, I have two training sites and there are at least 10 national team athletes here, I would say.

So that group and having Bill Endicott here has really helped.

That's why I moved here.

Paddling has always been a part of my life.

I've never known a time when I haven't been involved in canoes and kayaks.

My parents were on the Czech national team for quite a number of years.

They were world champions in team racing.

So I've been paddling for, since before I was born, actually.

My mother raced in the world championships when she was pregnant with me.

I got into my business rapid style, which is sewing canoe and kayak jackets and gear, and accessories kind of by accident.

I just made a couple and then I made a couple more.

I really enjoy it.

I like having something that's my own.

I don't know if I would be able to take directions from somebody else.

- [Narrator] In Europe, the legacy of the '72 Olympics was the artificial whitewater course.

For the 1992 Olympic games in Barcelona, the Spanish constructed the toughest artificial course in the world in the town of La Seu d'Urgell.

Going into the games.

it looked like the Europeans would have the advantage.

At the pre-Olympics in Seu, the US paddlers got a taste of what they would face in '92.

Elliot Weintrob and his C2 partner, Marty McCormick, grew up in Potomac, Maryland.

- [Elliot] It's fast, it's very powerful.

It's coming at you really quickly.

You have very little margin for error and it drops a lot.

It's got some good gradient in it, so you do feel like you're running downhill.

You can work your butt off and say, just to get down the course and not go very fast.

- [Narrator] With the Olympics just one year away, what the US team needed was its own artificial training center.

Architect, John Anderson, and fellow paddler, Scott Wilkinson, knew of the perfect place.

At the Pepco power plant in Dickerson, Maryland, is a 900-foot sluiceway, where cooling water for the plants' generators is returned to the river.

Bill Endicott.

- [Bill] Yeah, I remember 10 years ago I was going out to Dickerson and having practices there because the water was warm during the winter.

We'd look upstream and say, gee, wouldn't it be great if we had a course up there, a real one?

And then, we just laughed at each other 'cause we knew that it was never going to happen.

The Dickerson discharge canal was literally a whitewater course waiting to happen.

- These things have been done in Europe for more than 20 years.

And I had been on all these race courses over there and had a personal interest in doing one myself here.

And this seemed like a good opportunity.

- They put together a very professional proposal.

I liked the idea, it seemed kind of exciting, something new and different to do with the discharge canal 'cause otherwise, you know, they're just there, it's not being used for anything in particular.

- In about early June, Dick Shakeshaft, who's a plant manager here, came to me and asked that he had this idea from the Bethesda Center for Excellence, that we turn the Dickerson discharge canal into a training facility for the US kayak whitewater team.

I must admit my first impression was Shakeshaft had finally gone around the bend and gone crazy.

But on reflection, you know, in the world of the Olympics, there's mention that things start to happen and so it really went from there.

- [John] The primary tool was a model.

It was a working model of water running in it.

The David Taylor Research Center was very excited about the whole idea and they volunteered the use of a fabulous facility, something called the circulating water chamber, which was perfect.

- [Bill] We tried testing single rocks on the current and they didn't do very well.

None of the rocks performed well when they were by themselves.

When you start putting a bunch of them together, then they all start acting together and making the water do what you want it to do.

We were surprised if anything, how accurate the bottle was.

Take two, whole calls.

And he's trashed again!

- I would also like to thank the David Taylor Research Center.

- And we had a press conference.

At the conference, Bill Sam of Pepco told me that, look, we're going to do this, we're going to do it really fast, 'cause we know you need it for the Olympics.

We're going to give you a Thanksgiving Day present, he said.

And he did.

- [Engineer] This is a low, hollow hemisphere shape.

Again, designed to go either on a flat or sloping side.

- [Elliot] Well, when you first contact these people saying, I'm building an Olympic kayak, on the phone and they say, are you for real?

And the next thing they say, is for free?

- [John] These guys were just a whirlwind.

They came in with a work crew of about 25 people and spent a total of 10 days manufacturing 75 boulders.

- [Narrator] John Fred Angelo supervised the construction for Pepco.

- Well, now you have to remember, we built this thing with the water flowing.

The water never stopped in the power point.

Never, never ceased generating electricity.

The guys down here, I think they were all infected with wanting to win a gold medal.

We did all this in three days.

- [Elliot] There is a tremendous advantage.

Our biggest advantage was during the winter because the water was heated, and that's something that no one else in the whole world has, is an artificial course they can paddle on during the months of December, January, February.

- [Narrator] There was only one more hurdle left.

- [Canoeist] You know, the way the Barcelona's down the Savage River, and you're not going to be competing in the Olympics if you don't do well here.

- [Narrator] These team trials will be the toughest these athletes have ever faced.

Only three boats from each class will make the Olympic team.

It will be two days of races.

On day one, the fastest two boats in each class will make the cut.

On day two with a new course set, the rest will battle it out for the final spots.

Day one, race time.

A lifetime of training has come down to two minutes on the river.

Jon Lugbill is confident.

He's won many races on this river and he knows all the right moves.

(dramatic synth music) Early in his run, he hits a gate, but that only makes him pour on the speed.

- [Jon] I knew that last year I didn't paddle that well and I wasn't as trained up as I am now.

I'm starting to get to a point now where I'm very fast again.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, Davey Hearn readies for his run.

(timer beeps) Davey's determined not to hit the pole John just hit.

As he digs in, his paddle snags a rock, but it doesn't break his concentration.

- [Davey] We really try and be very focused and concentrated.

When you're concentrating well, time slows down in canoes.

- I was real close on 25.

- [Narrator] At the bottom, Jon has turned in a very fast run.

- So I just put down the gun and at the bottom, I was like, oh, I'm out of speed.

- [Narrator] Davey drops in low for the upstream at gate 23.

Those extra strokes will cost him seconds.

And in the end, first place.

His time is only second best, but today that's good enough to win him a spot on the team.

- Glad to see the old guys hanging out-- - [Narrator] Jon and Davey will be going to Spain.

- [Davey] Pressure's off to some extent, but this isn't the big race.

This is a stepping stone to the big race.

There's going to be another magnitude of pressure at the Olympics, I think.

- I never thought about not making it.

(laughs) I guess would be the best way to put it.

What's real exciting for me is that now I don't have to just keep working on the trials.

Now I can really just focus on the Olympics.

- In women's kayak, the race is between Cathy Hearn and Dana Chladek.

Cathy has a strong lead, but as she comes down to the end of the course and into gate 23, she makes a bad turn and slams into a rock, losing precious time.

But her run is still the fastest time so far.

Hot on her heels is Dana Chladek.

She has no problem with gate 23 and it looks as though she's going to have the better time.

But as she passes through the last gate, she hits the pole with the end of her boat.

That penalty puts her a half second out of first place.

In C2, the new team of Marty McCormick and Elliot Weintrob took first place with a perfect run.

- [Elliot] We were cruising, the crowd was going really wild and I knew this was the run.

Everything was going like clockwork.

I had this feeling of it's going to work.

Everything is dead on.

When we crossed the finish line, I was just like, yeah, that was it.

I mean, I couldn't believe it.

- Well, I tried to go a little harder actually.

Didn't happen.

- [Narrator] As the day ended, the pressure was still on Jamie McEwan.

He and Lecky hadn't made the team yet.

They'd have to race again tomorrow for that one last slot.

Day two, the last chance to make the team, and today only a win will count.

[Commentator] It's going to be tight for that third spot.

[Narrator] In the men's kayak class, another Marylander, Eric Jackson, makes third boat.

(dramatic synth music) - I think this was harder than the Olympics, at least the Olympics were there and the majority earned their spot, but you miss this, you don't get anything.

There's no glory in not making it.

- [Narrator] The last boats to race today are the C2s.

Would Jamie and Lecky find glory?

(dramatic synth music) Maybe not.

- [Canoeist] Go, go, go, go!

- [Narrator] The fates were smiling that day.

After 20 years, Jamie McEwan would get another shot at Olympic gold.

- It wasn't great.

We had a second run with stallers with gate 21.

- It was beautiful, I ran all the way along.

- It's like paddling with Superman, I mean, you have this guy, you know, he's a legend and everybody knows that, he knows it, I'm in the same boat with him.

- Hey, I'm gonna tell you more Olympic stories, 'cause he's so tired of them.

- [Narrator] More than half of the athletes on the Olympic team have their roots in Maryland.

They pass their test on the Savage.

But the real test will be in Seu, on an artificial course, not unlike their training course at Dickerson.

- Coming straight on it, you're in the eddy, you're moving downstream, you make a turn.

- [Canoeist] We'll try it both ways.

- Yeah, we'll see what works.

- [Jamie] When you get onto an artificial course, things are always changing.

You cannot really plan for anything.

You know, I love crashing down on a gate, being out of position, feeling out of control, snapping a stroke or a specific boat lane, and you're right back in the ball game.

The world championships, the world cup, that's for the people in the sport, the Olympics, that's for the public.

- [Davey] It's a big race, there's going to be a lot of pressure, probably more pressure than the world championship, but it's the same kind of competition that we're used to.

I'd like to put down two excellent runs at the Olympics and then see where the chips fall.

- [Jon] I'm probably faster than I've ever been before.

I'm about to become much better than I've ever been before.

It's a real exciting time for me.

I'm having the time of my life.

I'm going to do the best I can on August 1st and really let it pan out.

A medal in every class.

(upbeat synth music)