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| Written by Christian Knight |
| Thursday, 08 November 2007 09:22 |
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Everything on the morning of October 4 was just where it was supposed to be. The river permits. The massage booths. The media center. Banners flashing the Adidas logo stretched across Austria’s Otztal River. Platforms designed for international journalists and local dignitaries rose from its banks. The handmade brass title belt from Pakistan was waiting in a case along with the crystal medals. The athletes were all there, too. One hundred sixty of them from 27 different countries. All gathered in this Alps town to paddle a minute-long minefield of boulders and hydraulics. All of them throwing in $160 (U.S.) in registration fees. One of them was Tao Berman, the 28-year-old pro kayaker from Hood River, Oregon, who, over the last decade, had spun treacherous waterfalls into monetary windfalls of corporate contracts, which combined exceeds six figures. From mid-August until now, Berman had devoted the threshold of his athletic ambition to this section of river—pursuing workouts as extreme as the whitewater that made him famous. Sprints up Hood River’s famous 425-step staircase. Three times. Multiple sets of 20-rep pull-ups with 40 pounds of dead weight strapped to his back. Ab crunches while his workout partners for the day were laying on the floor heaving and recovering. When the Little White Salmon and White Salmon had dropped out, Berman headed to Central Washington’s Tumwater Canyon and to the North Fork of the Payette. Six weeks he trained for this Wellebruke section of Austria’s Otztal River, passing up parties and play days, ignoring the urge to just take it easy and read a book while his muscles recovered. Seems like a lot of effort and a long distance for a section that would last only as long as he could hold his breath. But this wasn’t any section of river. This was the site of the Sickline Extreme Kayak World Championships. The first of its kind for extreme kayak racing. For Berman, the championships were another opportunity to assert his dominance in extreme racing. The Red Bull athlete had competed in three timed races that year and hadn’t lost—not even to Brad Ludden during the Teva Mountain Games on Ludden’s Class V backyard run, Homestake Creek. He did earn some attention for victory, but the topics that garnered the most responses on Boatertalk.com chatrooms were the ones about his outlandish media exploits: The 2006 Stunt Junkies episode that featured Berman seal launching out of a helicopter and into the froth of 50-foot Superior Falls, or the 2005 NBC Sports special on extreme sports that focused on his 300-foot slide down Vancouver Island’s Lacey Falls into five-feet of out-going tidewater. To his detractors, those exploits had made Berman seem more stuntman than athlete. But a world title might help him salvage some of the guide-shack credibility he lost when he retired from freestyle competitions in 2004 and at the same time disappeared from the industry’s extreme kayaking flicks. So a couple days before the race he believed he could win, Berman was excited. Race director Olaf Obsommer and the rest of the event officials, however, were not. The weather, you see, was nice. Too nice for early October. Up at 8,500 feet, where it should have been snowing, the weather was hanging out in the 50s. The water level was already at one meter, 98 centimeters, eight centimeters higher than the maximum flow the city of Oetzal would allow. The warming had already forced Obsommer and the rest of the race officials to postpone the qualifiers until Saturday, the same day as the finals. And Tim Weinmman hadn’t even gone kayaking yet. Weinmann, 25, was in town for the championships, of course. But he was often in Oetzal when the weather was like this, when the water was like this, to run the Class V Holy Cross gorge of the Otztal’s Venter Ache tributary about 15 miles closer to the glacier that was causing so much trouble. Two days earlier, Gynner C. Paris had paddled the same section. Paris was in town to represent Ecuador in the championships. And though he had decided to go on somewhat of a whim, the Hood River resident had taken that whim seriously. So he prepared for it. Weights. Cardio. Training runs on his backyard stash steeps, the Little White and White Salmon Rivers. Just before flying to Austria, Paris had paddled his way through the Sierra’s stash of late summer Class V whitewater. So the Class V kayaker was in Class V shape. And Paris took the Holy Cross section seriously. “We scouted three times and portaged once,” he said. “But I was with somebody who knew the run. If I was with someone who didn’t know it, we would have scouted a bit more.” The river, he said, didn’t resemble the West Coast stuff he was used to. It was full of sharp, sievy, unpredictable rock. “One of those canyons where the rock falls off the sides,” he said. “It’s a really narrow gorge. Deep. Steep-walled. It’s really cold in there. The glacier is not far upstream. Portaging and scouting was tricky and slippery.” The group, which accumulated that late Thursday morning on the Venter Ache was so large, it split into two, with Weinmann leading the second group. Weinmann was a good person to lead: He knew the river, and his fellow paddlers knew he was both capable and conservative. The accident happened early on in the run at a nine-foot ledge Weinmann chose to run first. The last images of Weinmann were ominous ones: Him, out of his boat, trying to swim toward the bank and wave to the rest of the group members, who in their boats at the lip of the drop; then as the group was trying to chase him down, the current dragging Weinmann, reportedly on the edge of consciousness, deeper into the gorge. That’s it. That’s the last of Weinmann. They found his boat that day. But his body remained elusive for three more days, even into the first night’s recovery effort of more than 200 searchers. For Sonja Guldner Hamel, the news of Weinmann’s death was the initiation of one of the worst workdays in her professional life. She had liked Weinmann ever since they met and traveled with him two years earlier to a Norwegian paddling event. But she was also the voice of the championships, a public affairs director for Adidas’ events. She was the contact for those 30 on-assignment journalists and the handful of other dailies with a curiosity for fluffy features on competitions, parades, and holidays. Within hours of Weinmann’s disappearance, Guldner Hamel was repeating the same line to a dozen more daily newspaper reporters, who were now a little more than curious. “I was trying very hard to point out that accident happened before the event and that it happened at easier part of river,” she said. “It’s very hard to talk about a casualty if you don’t have the body yet. You can’t write about a dead person you haven’t even found yet.” Guldner Hamel realized very quickly the race effort had lost any hope of resorting to a Plan B, of convincing the town’s officials to allow the race to go on on a different section. “Of course the local authorities realized what it meant,” she said. “On a different section of river, that water level would have been absolutely fine. It was impossible to get people to renegotiate. We knew by the way the media reacted that there was no way.” The celebration they had planned for that night’s opening ceremonies, race officials agreed, would be scrapped. Instead, they’d open the championships with a moment of silence for Weinmann and an announcement that the water level was too high and it might not recede; but if it does, qualifiers would take place Friday morning, finals Friday afternoon. “I studied the public relations mess of the Exxon Valdez in college,” Guldner Hamel said. “This was my Exxon Valdez.” The next morning greeted Guldner Hamel with a water level that hadn’t receded and a barrage of newspaper stories sensationalizing the accident. “One or two papers published that a kayaker died at world championships,” she said. “The paper from Weinmann’s hometown (Augsburg, Germany) had a headline that said “Lost in the Death Gorge.” The water level rose to 204 centimeters on Saturday, forcing the Sickline crew to cancel the event. It peaked at 208 centimeters on Sunday, then began a quick recession to race-approved levels by Tuesday afternoon. “I spent two months of my life, training,” Berman said. “I was in great shape. I had timed everything to be peaking right on the event. I woke up the day of the event to everything being canceled. But I felt bad for the organizers. They put so much time and creativity into the event. It was the most professionally run event I’ve ever been to.” |
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