David Hearn
Whitewater Canoeing
During the 1992 Olympics
in Spain, U.S. canoer and Bethesda, Md., resident David Hearn
stepped into an elevator with U.S. basketball player Patrick Ewing
and froze.
For several minutes, the
5-foot-10-inch Hearn stood next to the 7-foot Ewing in silence. “I
was too shy to even say hello,” says Hearn, recalling his first trip
to the Olympics.
This year in Sydney,
Hearn, a whitewater canoer, plans to make his mark. Not that he’s
performed badly in previous years, placing 11th in 1992 and ninth in
1996 in Atlanta. But the 41-year-old Olympic veteran recently had
his first child with his wife, Jennifer, and Sydney may be his last
best chance for a medal.
David, who grew up in
Garrett Park, Md., and attended Walter Johnson High School in
Bethesda, doesn’t need a medal to validate his place among the
United States’ top canoers. He’s twice won the Whitewater World
Championships, he’s a five-time world champion silver medalist, and
he’s won 26 national championship titles, more than any other
American.
His event, the C1,
requires immense upper-body strength, quick reflexes and cat-like
flexibility. Unlike whitewater kayakers, whitewater canoers kneel in
the boat and use a paddle with only one blade.
In the Olympics,
competitors get two runs down a slalom course with gates that must
be passed through either upstream or downstream. The two times are
added together, plus penalties for missing or hitting gates. One run
usually takes about two minutes. Like in slalom skiing, canoers do
not get a practice run on the course before the event.
For the first time in the
Olympics, the penalty for hitting a gate has been reduced to two
seconds from five seconds. The new rule benefits risk-takers, who
can go a little faster and still win with a penalty, David says. “It
might be a strategy on a really hard move that might take more than
two seconds,” he says.
David trains locally on
the Potomac River, working with his coach, Silvan Poberaj, and his
wife.
On a recent weekday
morning, David is paddling through a series of 20-second workouts,
navigating gates at the Feeder Canal off of the Potomac River near
Great Falls, Md.
Jennifer is timing David
with a stopwatch in one hand while she feeds tiny pieces of mango to
16-month-old Jesse Carter Hearn with the other hand.
“We were married here,”
she says, pointing to a grassy opening just 30 feet from the water.
“People thought we were going to paddle away.”
David and Jennifer were
married in 1991, about seven years after they first met at a
whitewater race. While Jennifer is not a world-class whitewater
canoer, she is an experienced racer, former national team member and
a full-time coach for David. Jennifer calls herself the “human video
camera” for David, helping him improve his technique and also
scouting out courses and other competitors. After every practice
run, he paddles by her, discussing his technique and asking for
advice.
Among other nations, the
French, Slovaks, Germans and Poles are some of the top in the world.
The United States dominated the sport in the late ’70s and early
’80s, but David is among the last of the U.S. racers who competed
during that time. David comes from a paddling family. His father,
Carter, used to take him racing, and his sister, Cathy, is a
two-time whitewater Olympian and the first alternate on the 2000
team. Another brother, Bill, makes paddles and was on the national
team.
With such a pedigree,
David got into the sport when he was young; he and his friends would
paddle nearly every day after school. “It became a way to pursue
sports at the highest level and still have a fun time,” he says.
All these years later,
the sport remains fun for David. “It’s one of the few sports where
you can train and still have a ball 50 percent of the time,” he
says. Right now, in preparation for the Olympics, David is doing
boat training almost exclusively. In the winter, he mixes in
running, biking, skiing and in-line skating. To make ends meet, he
and Jennifer run their own paddling-gear business called
Maximum Whitewater
Performance.
David’s experience may
suit him well in Sydney. He describes the Olympics as
“head-swiveling” for a participant. It’s an amazing experience, he
says, to go for an early-morning run in the Olympic Village.
“You can go shoulder to
shoulder, at least briefly, with runners from Kenya,” he says.
But among the strangest
experiences David has had at the Olympics was in 1996 in Atlanta,
when a stranger approached him and knew who he was. It wasn’t
something that a U.S. canoer expects, even in his own country.
“That was freaky,”
Jennifer says.
—Jeremy Shweder
