End of an Era: Scott Shipley Retires

Paddler magazine, May/June 2002

Anyone who questions what good could come of spending a lifetime in pursuit of a single thing need look no further than Scott Shipley in a kayak. There is a virtuosity to his paddling, a flow and grace that make it unmistakably his own, as unique and beautiful in its way as Charlie Parker�s saxophone or Picasso�s brushstrokes. As the 30-year old Poulsbo, Washington native contemplates retirement after 13 years on the national slalom team, that indelible style could stand alone as fitting legacy to an extraordinary career.

There are no style points in slalom racing, of course. Shipley�s career will instead be judged in objective terms, by which he is without question the dominant slalom kayaker of his generation. His laurels include three overall world cup titles, three world championship silvers, and medals from a staggering 80 percent of international races he entered � everything but an Olympic medal and a senior world championship. The media shined their klieg lights at Shipley�s Olympic failures and pegged him as the golden boy who wasn�t, an icon of sacrifice and virtue who failed to punch his ticket for the magic carpet ride they had scripted for him.

Maybe so, but Shipley sees a bigger picture, grounded in the pure joy of competition and the friendships it forged. �What I will always be proud of � maybe it�s my contribution to the sport � is the way we did it, the way we trained and the way we raced,� he says. In 1990, Shipley, Rich Weiss and Brian Brown went into the woods determined to lift American slalom kayaking up by its bootstraps, and to everyone�s surprise but their own, succeeded.

�That group, more than myself alone later or any other group I saw, was so focused and directed and perfect in the way we attacked slalom,� Shipley says. �I may never be a part of something like that again.� They gathered at the Chilliwack River in British Columbia, where moisture-rich clouds roll in from the Pacific, gather against the backstop of the Cascade range and empty themselves onto its western slope. Hard winters there bring wet, heavy snow in head-high drifts; while milder years deliver a seemingly incessant cold drizzle. In every season, the Chilliwack flows cold and fast through a deep, sunless canyon. There�s no better whitewater course in North America, says Shipley, who discovered it as a teenager, making the 8-hour roundtrip from his hometown of Poulsbo, Washington each weekend to train with Canadian team athletes there.

Chilliwack was already home to the best Canadian racers, including future world champion David Ford and Patrice Gagnon, but even in that select company Weiss, Brown and Shipley had something special. �It became a very symbiotic relationship,� Shipley says. �It became essential to me, and to Rich and Brian, that we make the other two faster so that we could make ourselves faster.� Lacking a full-time coach, they coached each other. Starting from Shipley�s earliest days in a boat, his father had turned technique questions back at him, forcing him to think through the problem and develop his own solution. That had been Shipley�s early education in self-coaching; Chilliwack was a graduate course.

When Shipley was developing as a paddler in the 1980s, American kayak coaches taught a slashing style inspired by the dominating American canoes. But what worked for the likes of canoeists Jon Lugbill and Davey Hearn didn�t translate into the kayaks. Shipley nurtured a more fluid style, inspired by early mentors like John Day and Canadian team coach Eric Munshaw, and refined by the French coach Jean-Michele Prono. They urged Shipley to anticipate, to lead with his shoulders, to carve instead of pivot. Their coaching was intermittent, and Shipley tested every suggestion rigorously on the river. �Scott always wants to hear what coaches have to say, but he�s reluctant to follow blindly,� says USA Canoe Kayak Slalom Director Brian Parsons. �He developed his own style and made it incredibly successful.�

Before 1990, American men had cracked the top five in international kayak competition exactly twice, once in 1979, and again in 1989, when Weiss finished fifth at the world championships on Maryland�s Savage River. At those worlds a judging error cost Weiss the bronze medal. He handled the disappointment gracefully, for which he earned the prestigious Jack Kelly Fair Play Award. But Weiss took a far more valuable consolation prize back to Chilliwack, one in which Shipley and the others shared equally: the certain knowledge that an American kayak could compete with the best in the world.

�We knew we were going to break through to the top guys in the world. It was just a feeling. We were on the cusp,� recalls Parsons. Their gains were palpable, fueled by a workload and intensity beyond anything Shipley had done alone. River running was always central to the plan. �We ran incredibly tight creeks that we really had no business being on, and we did it in 14-foot slalom boats with pointy ends,� recalls Larry Norman, a 15-year Canadian team member and close Shipley friend. �Scott would never back down from anything.�

After their first season in Chilliwack, Weiss finished third in the world cup standings, and Shipley and Brown were both in the top ten. Another Canadian winter brought further progress. In Europe after winning the 1992 Olympic trials, Shipley dreamt he won the world cup race at Nottingham, England. The Nottingham course was the opposite of the steep, pushy whitewater on which Shipley excelled. The medal-studded field included Shipley�s boyhood idol, the 6-time world champion Richard Fox, and a powerful British squad on its home course. The smart choice would have been to skip Nottingham and concentrate on his Olympic preparations, but buoyed by the dream, Shipley placed a late entry. He won that race, his first world cup victory and the first ever by an American. His teammates called it his �I have a dream race.� In fact he had answered all of their dreams. On the eve of the all-important Olympic games, Shipley had shown that American kayaks could not only compete, they could win.

When Shipley arrived in Barcelona later that summer, Sports Illustrated had anointed him a gold-medal contender. In reality, only Shipley and the magazine reporter thought he had a realistic shot. Nottingham is one thing, the Olympics something else entirely. American team officials would have been happy with a top-ten finish and delighted with top five.

They would get neither. On an otherwise crisp and blazingly fast final run, Shipley missed the thirteenth gate, incurring a 50-second penalty that pushed him to 27th place overall. Later, walking the course with Norman, he looked at the move and said, �That�s where I lost the race.� To Norman, the comment spoke volumes. After the most disappointing race of his career, in which a rudimentary lapse turned his Olympic experience into a dismal failure, Shipley still thought it had been his race to lose. �Scott never entered a race that he didn�t think he was going to win,� says Norman.

Shipley seemed destined to be a slalom racer. His father Dick Shipley had competed in canoe at the 1965 world championships, and an ancient Grumman was parked permanently at the Shipley family home on Puget Sound. �We did a lot of fishing when I was growing up, and I hated it,� Shipley recalls. Spending long hours under the Puget Sound drizzle was Dick Shipley�s idea of a good time, not his youngest son�s. �My brother was always pushing to go out in the canoe, and I was always trying to hide from it. It sounded an awful lot like fishing,� he says. That changed one day when Shipley was six years old, when Dick Shipley finally took his boys out in that Grumman canoe, the same one Dick had learned to paddle in with his father. That day marked the end of fishing, and anything else besides boating, as a serious pursuit in the Shipley family. Soon they were racing. Paul, 21 months older than Scott, competed in C-2 slalom with Dick, while Scott and Dick raced downriver.

For Christmas when Scott was in third grade, the Shipleys gave their sons a red fiberglass Shark kayak. �Dick sat the boys in a kitchen chair in the living room and put a paddle in their hands and taught them how to roll,� recalls Sue Shipley. Puget Sound is numbingly cold in winter, but nothing would keep the Shipley boys out of that kayak. �They went out to the bay, and Dick waded out while I ran in the house and filled a tub with boiling hot water,� Sue Shipley says. �Dick tipped them upside down and they both came up screaming and ran across the lawn and jumped in the tub. I thought for a long time the neighbors were going to call Child Protective Services,� she says. �It looked pretty mean, but the next day they went out there and did it again.�

The Shipley boys were soon adopted into the Seattle area slalom scene. They idolized older paddlers like Jim and John Day, local athletes who had made a mark on the national scene. They rewarded the boys with coaching, encouragement and acceptance into the scene. Shipley sat in on the late-night campfires and bull sessions on technique. He laughed at the in-jokes, and listened to stories about the greats of the day, men like Jon Lugbill, who dominated international canoe racing, and Britain�s Richard Fox, undisputed heavyweight champion of men�s kayak. When Shipley was 13, a top local racer named John Abbenhouse sold him a slalom boat for $100. The price was absurdly low, as close to a gift as Abbenhouse could go without it looking like charity. �Someday that kid�s going to be a world champion, and I want to be able to say I had a part in it,� he told Sue Shipley when she protested.

Shipley�s paddling entered a new dimension when Paul Shipley got his driver�s license and the brothers began the weekend pilgrimages to Chilliwack. Even then Shipley stood out. As the youngest Chilliwack regular his physical gifts had yet to develop. He was fanatically dedicated, but no more so than the Canadian team athletes training in Chilliwack. What made Shipley special was his feel for the boat, his innate sense of speed and momentum. His style, already distinctive, guarded momentum like a miser hoarded gold. At 14 he already had the confidence to give up time at the top of a course knowing he would gain it back, and more, before the finish.

In 1986, both Shipley brothers qualified for the junior world championships, Scott in K-1 and Paul in C-1. The family could only afford to send one son to Europe; the younger Scott would have to wait two years for his turn. The paddler who started behind Shipley at the junior nationals that year, a veteran of the worlds Scott had been forced to skip, asked to delay his start by an extra minute. It was a brazen display of disrespect, implying that Shipley was so slow he would be overtaken from behind. Furious, Shipley won that race, and every other junior competition he ever entered.

When 1988 finally came, Shipley won the junior team trials and also made the senior national team, at 16 becoming the youngest-ever kayak on the U.S. squad. Arriving at the junior world championships, he found that he again had been underestimated, this time not by a cocksure teenaged rival, but by the entire whitewater establishment. Race officials started Shipley and the rest of the U.S. team in the first flight, an under card reserved for athletes of whom nothing is expected. Shipley�s race was over before many of the spectators bothered to arrive. He won anyway.

Shipley would not be underestimated again. When he arrived eight years later for the 1996 Olympics on Tennessee�s Ocoee River, he was the most celebrated slalom athlete in American history. Having won three international races on the Olympic course, he was the fickle sport�s closest thing to a sure bet. Best of all he was accommodating, good-looking in a wholesome way, and achingly sincere. Shipley was the paragon of the Olympic ideal, not because he followed the script as so many athletes do, but because he lived it.

When Bosnia�s sole Olympic paddler, a kayaker named Samir Karabasic, smashed his boat in practice, Shipley reflexively offered his spare. After all, hadn�t John Abbenhouse done the same for him? Karabasic�s difficult path to Atlanta � he escaped his besieged town after 10 tries � made delicious copy, and the media ate it up. The story made him an instant celebrity, and like Weiss seven years earlier he won the Jack Kelly Fair Play Award. But on the racecourse, Shipley fell slightly off line, his timing almost imperceptibly out. He finished twelfth.

Out of that disappointment came what Shipley considers the most meaningful accomplishment of his paddling career, collecting $40,000 worth of boats and paddling gear and delivering it to Karabasic�s club, which had been leveled in the Bosnian war, along with some 80 boats. The highlight for Shipley was paddling with the kids. �Those kids are now their national team. It�s like a phoenix rising out of the ashes,� he says.

At the 1999 world championships, when he was studying a tricky gate move between runs, a young boy tugged on his T-shirt and asked for his autograph, Parsons recalls. �Scott�s in the middle of the World Championship finals, and he takes the time to sign this kid�s autograph, and pose for a picture. I know that kid, and he�s a slalom racer now.�

Shipley won the silver medal at that world championships, capping an extraordinary season in which he medalled on every stop on the world cup tour. At his third Olympics in Sydney he was again among the gold medal favorites, but brushed a gate and finished fifth, 1.41 seconds out of the medals. He thought about retirement, but the 2001 World Championships on the Ocoee beckoned. �After Sydney I thought, well, I�m done, but I�d like to race once more in America, once more on the Ocoee especially.�

For the first time in his career Shipley did not make paddling his only priority. Ratcheting back from 12 to nine workouts a week, he completed a book on slalom training (see sidebar) and in August finished the engineering degree he started 12 years and three Olympics ago. He skipped the world cup and trained through the summer with Atlanta juniors. �It was great. I was like, �bring it on little guy � let�s go.� I would do a run, then they would do a run, and we�d handicap by that much the rest of the workout. We were totally talking smack.� It was classic Shipley, turning a disadvantage to his favor, giving back to the sport, but most of all seeking out competition and thriving on it.

Everyone in slalom has a theory to explain Shipley�s inability to win at the Olympics and World Championships. Perhaps he put too much pressure on himself; perhaps he spread himself too thin in his determination to win every race. Maybe, some say, he was just unlucky. It�s as good a theory as any. In this, Shipley�s thirteenth year on the national team, undefeated going into the world championships on his home course, the race is cancelled after a terrorist attack the scale of which was beyond imagining.

Among the September 11th attack�s million lesser casualties was Shipley�s storybook ending. Always the innovator, he talked of an athlete-run competition in defiance of the terrorists. �At its barest bones, the World Championships is a bunch of people who want to race to see who the best in the world are,� Shipley says. �If you can�t have it on the Ocoee, we�re more than happy to take it to the Hiawassee and rumble in the jungle, and we�ll come out and let you know who won.� The idea is pure Shipley, but in the week after the Twin Towers attack the slalom world was as stunned as everyone else. The athletes shuffled home to start training for next year, or, in Shipley�s case, to ponder the inevitable.

He says he�s as sure about retirement as was Michael Jordan. Paddling has been the driving force in Shipley�s life since he was six years old, and retirement or not, he hasn�t managed to stop training. �If you count me down for a race, I�m like Pavlov�s dog � I�ve got to go.�

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