Downhill Paddler -- On His Way To Atlanta, Poulsbo's Scott Shipley Cashes In On A Childhood Obsession

SCOTT SHIPLEY STRETCHES HIS LANKY frame across the back seat of a rented car and, the Olympic kayaker betraying the heart of an engineering nerd, confesses his love for spreadsheets and graphs and lists.

His girlfriend, an upwardly mobile young paddler named Sarah Leith, confides that she pins on Detroit Red Wing charms for good luck. Shipley, a 24-old Poulsbo native, favors more calculable rituals: charts spelling out how he spent each of 711 minutes training on the water and in the gym during a recent week; homemade formulas rating the strength, lactic and aerobic qualities of each workout; hand-written race-day schedules with precise times for waking up, dressing, eating breakfast and driving to the river.

Shipley has less use for sports shrinks and their motivation tricks. Back in 1989, he worked with a sports psychologist. Turned into the worst season of his career.

Still, one exercise - one with a graph - stuck with him. The psychologist drew a line on a blackboard, then wrote "relaxed" on one side, "nervous" on the other. Shipley was the only paddler whose temperament measurement strayed too far toward the relaxed side.

So relaxed that a photograph showed Shipley, in the middle of a race, gripping his paddle with just thumb and forefingers, his other fingers extended in the air like a British lord drinking tea. So pressure-resistant that the only mind game he played while negotiating rapids during some races was recalling old rock lyrics. So calm that he gained a reputation during his early career for not psyching up for easy races he should have won.

"I figured out that you've got to scare the hell out of yourself," says Shipley. "Now I do it in big races by telling myself, `I'm going to lose my job if I don't win.' "

These days, Shipley's job is reducing a cruelly unpredictable quest - becoming the best in the world at guiding a 16-foot fiberglass kayak through four-foot gates down a boiling stretch of river for three minutes on one specific day next July at the Atlanta Olympics - to something resembling an act of planning and science.

Shipley, winner of the prestigious World Cup series two of the past three years, is among the finest whitewater paddlers in the world right now. Even with the Olympic team tryouts two weeks away, there are enormous expectations that he will become the first American kayaker to win an Olympic medal in Atlanta this July.

Summoning fear - or at least, pressure - won't be an issue this time.

Four years ago at the Barcelona games, Shipley, then a 21-year-old with a budding international reputation, skipped the opening ceremonies and much of the Olympic hoopla to focus on his task. But he missed a gate - and any chance for a medal - on his final run. Stunned and deflated, he left Spain early.

"I didn't realize until then how much I had counted on winning a medal. When it fell apart at the end, it was hard for me to handle," says Shipley, who plans on giving up full-time training after this year to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering.

"Hey, if I'd known I was going to finish 27th, I'd at least have gone to the opening ceremony."

THERE ARE LOTS OF WAYS guys like Scott Shipley are different from the rest of us.

You can start with his 3-percent body fat, the V-shaped upper body of a champion weight lifter and the ability to visualize precisely in his mind - in real time - each maneuver through every boil and eddy on a surging stretch of whitewater.

Then there is evidence that Shipley has been plotting all this out from the moment he crawled into the bow of his dad's canoe at age 6, just outside the family's front door on Liberty Bay in Poulsbo. His father, Dick, a one-time member of the U.S. national kayak team, told Scott that he couldn't skip his Little League baseball games to enter paddling races. So at age 9 he gave up baseball.

In a geometry class at North Kitsap Middle School, Shipley carved a set of Olympic rings into his ink blotter, etching the date "1992" - a reference to the first games in two decades where whitewater kayaking would be an official event. (A few years later, when Leith read about that story in a kayaking magazine, she carved her own rings. "My first groupie," he teases her.)

Shipley laughs at the hokeyness of the tale. "I just don't think I ever questioned whether I'd make the Olympics or not," he says. "Boy, it's amazing how arrogant that sounds now."

Like a pair of more famous Olympians from the Northwest - skiing stars Phil and Steve Mahre of White Pass - Shipley has risen in a sport dominated by Easterners and Europeans by carving out his own, stubbornly independent route. And like the Mahres, Shipley's family were his first teammates.

His father, an engineer at the Bremerton Naval Shipyard, bought Scott his first boat when he was in third grade. He and his older brother, Paul, practiced moves chasing the swells from passing power boats and, on occasion, following the riptides into the forbidden waters of a nearby Navy submarine-testing site. Fishermen often cut down gates installed on the Cedar and Snoqualmie rivers, so the Shipleys spent weekends driving to British Columbia for workouts. Until he was 16, Shipley rarely ventured on the water for training without his father and brother alongside.

After his first year at Western Washington University, Shipley dropped out and withdrew his last $65 from a cash machine to finance his trip to an international circuit race in Colorado. Surprising himself, Shipley finished third. It was the last paying place, worth $500. He hasn't worked a real job since then.

No small achievement in a sport that now demands paddlers train year-round but offers few ways for any but a handful to support themselves doing it.

THE NANTAHALA RIVER IN North Carolina, winding through the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, is to the whitewater subculture what Hood River, Ore., is for sailboarding bums.

Restaurant and motel parking lots are filled with four-wheel-drive vehicles sporting a brightly colored kayak or two on their roofs. In the summer, 280,000 weekend fun-seekers will run this water in rafts, kayaks, canoes and inflatable boats. In the chill of March, though, the river is the property of the hardcore: Americans, Russians, Canadians, Swedes, Italians, even a Guatemalan and a Malay training for the Olympics that will be run on the nearby Ocoee River in Tennessee.

At times, it seems all of them are crashing at Shipley's $300-a-month cabin in the hills. The interior desigh is a clash of unmade beds, kayak posters in four different languages, Neoprene clothing and sweats in various states of drying, empty soda cans, piles of magazines, a sofa, two chairs and a huge Olympic flag on the wall.

A mess. But Shipley has reason to be proud of it. After seven years of constant traveling, living at times in treehouses and tents, this is his first home. He shows off the fruits of his first hobby, a cherry-wood desk made with new power tools. A hobby is a big step forward for a guy who has lived off and on for years here at the edge of the Smoky Mountain National Park, yet has never gone inside the park for a hike.

"It's blowing my mind that I've got a stereo and a car. This is my first TV," he says, pointing to a new set in the living room. "People think this life is glamorous. It's three years of being the lamest guy in the world. Then a year of being the greatest when the Olympics roll around."

"Make that two weeks. If you make the team," chimes in a British coach spending the week sleeping on Shipley's floor.

Neither lament is all that convincing.

The cabin, as well as the TV and new Ford Aerostar that a local supporter recently helped Shipley buy, are statements about how fast things are changing in the world of paddling.

Ten years ago, Judy Harrison, editor of Canoe and Kayak Magazine, drove vainly around upstate New York for four hours in search of the U.S. nationals course because no one had bothered to post a sign to guide spectators. Top racers savaged the first major sponsor of the national kayak team, Champion Paper Co., because of its environmental record. In a Washington, D.C., suburb where many people train, impoverished paddlers once raised money by standing on a street corner with their kayaks and peddling autographs.

The boom in the outdoor-recreation business has begun putting cash on the table for more obscure athletes. Harrison figures perhaps 20 mountain bikers make a living of sorts from endorsements. The number, she says, dwindles to three or four in kayaking.

None has proved more marketable - nor worked harder at selling himself - than Shipley.

His friendliness and gentle wisecracking manner is so contagious that in a sport where rivals compete fiercely for a handful of national team spots and even fewer financial crumbs, no one offers a backbiting word about his success. He mentions his sponsors every chance he gets on an online Olympic hopefuls diary he writes for an NBC Web site. He even books motel reservations for reporters.

Shipley's big breakthrough came last year when he struck a deal with Adidas that dresses him from socks to hats in the manufacturer's gear, while also providing financial support for the once-unheard-of luxury of training through the winter this year in Costa Rica and Chile. A North Carolina boat manufacturer builds and sells a boat he recently designed. Werner Paddles of Everett splashes pictures of Shipley across its ads, while he recently landed a sunglasses endorsement.

"People tease me about my stable," says Shipley, who of late has even been searching for a car sponsor. Maybe the Hummer, a knock-off of an amphibious military vehicle, he muses. "I don't look at it as a gift in return for my paddling. I look at it as these companies buying something of value. I work hard at delivering it to them."

Even MTV called the other day, asking him to make a homemade video "expressing his personality" for the Olympic season. Even the usually gregarious Shipley has stuttered over that project.

KAYAKING WILL NEVER MAKE it big on ESPN. The camera deflates the sport to flailing paddles, bobbing helmets, foam and techno-chatter from commentators about "hitting the right line."

It really should be seen from the riverbank, as the whoosh of water over rocks drowns out other sounds, turning each run into a mesmerizing silent movie. At a weekend training run on the Nantahala, boat after boat navigates a frothing drop where the current seems to push in three directions. Several flip. Shipley comes rushing through one gate, stops with a quick stab of his paddle, pivots and takes three powerful strokes back upstream, then squeezes his long torso through another gate before spinning down current again.

For paddlers, who must think three or four gates ahead, it's a matter of physics and geometry boiled down to instinct. They must calculate how fast the water is moving in a given spot, then play the current to align themselves through each gate so they have a clean shot at the next one.

A kayaker, quoted in the Economist Magazine, likened his chosen sport to playing golf with the tees and greens in motion.

And like the golf tour, nobody wins very often.

As the most consistent paddler in the world the past three years, Shipley has won less than 10 percent of his races. At many events, less than two seconds separates the top 15 finishers. A gust of wind can blow a gate into a paddler. Water levels occasionally rise and fall several feet during a two-day race, the speed of the river shifting along with it.

That leaves Shipley, despite the most glittering resume in the brief history of American kayaking, hardly a shoo-in to qualify for the Olympic team.

"There is an incredible amount of variables at play," says Boo Turner, a Seattle writer and former member of the women's national team. "People in the sport accept the beauty and brutality of that."

During the 1992 Barcelona games, everything unraveled for Shipley in a split second. At the halfway point of the man-made course in Spain, his run was nearly a half-second faster than the nearest competitor. Paddling into a swirling boil, he got pushed sideways and badly missed a gate.

Afterward, his easy-going manner disappeared. Shipley, teased by buddies about his ability to get tipsy after a single beer, rarely drinks. But for five days after the race he went on a binge, wandering depressed from party to party. He slept on the beaches at night and brooded about quitting. Finally an American who had won the gold medal in doubles canoeing sat him down for a talk, telling Shipley such thoughts were nuts.

The next day, skipping the closing ceremonies, he flew home to Poulsbo and began training anew.

"It made a big impression on me," Shipley says. "Here you had hundreds of years worth of paddling experience among all of us working to get here. And the only ones not miserable were the couple of people who won gold medals. I thought it was pretty remarkable and depressing.

"I think my attitude will be different this time. I hope so."

Last year, with 6,000 people cheering from the banks, Shipley won his second World Cup championship on the Ocoee River, site of the Atlanta Olympics course. In one of the most overpowering kayaking performances ever, he came back from sixth place after two runs to win by more than a full second.

A more impressive display of his mental toughness, though, came a few months earlier at the qualifying races for the U.S. national team. With Olympic training support, a slot in World Cup races, endorsements and basically his whole season on the the line, Shipley was in danger of losing his team slot after two mediocre runs the first day.

On his third try, he was thrown badly off course. For a split second, Shipley considered chucking the run. Instead, he threw all the pre-race visualization and strategizing out the boat, relying instead on what he jokingly now refers to as the " . . . upstream hand of God." He pushed himself through the next four gates backward - a maneuver, to carry the golf analogy a bit further, akin to hitting a wedge shot in an earthquake.

Incredibly, the run qualified him for the team. He had paddled in reverse fast enough to save his job.

Jim Simon is a writer for Pacific Magazine. His e-mail address is jsim-new@seatimes.com. Harley Soltes is Pacific's photographer. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Paddle racing

IN TERMS OF Olympic tradition, whitewater kayaking and canoeing rank up there with, oh, team handball. In short, there is very little of it.

Slalom paddling first debuted in the Olympics in 1972. Then it waited 20 years - until the Barcelona games - for a return engagement. Paddling groups lobbied to get whitewater events included in Atlanta, whose organizers initially balked at the hefty bill. The U.S. Forest Service came to their rescue, spending $14 million to convert a dry stretch of the Ocoee River in Tennessee into a 550-meter long course. It costs the federal Tennessee Valley Authority between $3,000 to $5,000 per day to spill water from its dams for the event.

By contrast, kayaking and canoe sprinting, conducted on flat water that comes free, have been Olympic sports since 1936. One of America's greatest flatwater champions is Greg Barton of Bellingham, winner of the gold medals in single and double 1,000-meter events at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and a bronze medal in 1992 at Barcelona.

Think of flatwater paddling as cross-country skiing and whitewater kayaking its more adventuresome cousin, downhill skiing. In canoe events, participants use a single-sided paddle and kneel in the cockpit. Kayakers use a double-paddle and sit in their boats with their legs extended. Despite possessing some of the finest whitewater in the nation, Northwest paddlers generally go East for organized programs and training sites.

Still, there are a smattering of local races this summer that welcome paddlers of all skill levels and ages. June 1-2 is the Salmon le Sac Race, which has been run since the 1950s on the Cle Elum River. Contact Dick Shipley, (360) 779-7250.

To find out more about competitive whitewater paddling, contact the League of Northwest Whitewater Racers, (206) 933-1178 or the Washington Kayak Club, (206) 433-1983 or 365-9137. - Jim Simon