When and how the Slalom World Cup was born

The Canoe Slalom World Cup has a long history that began in 1988 with Bill Endicott. With him I tried to reconstruct the origins of this event before addressing in subsequent posts some issues that seem to give a different physiognomy to this event which this year has reached its 36th edition with 170 races held in 36 years! 

                                                Bill Endicott wrote:

At the 1987 World Championships in Bourg St. Maurice, France, Richard Fox approached me and said that we needed to have a World Cup in Slalom as other sports had.  Since we were not in the Olympics then and the World Championships were every other year, he said we needed to have an event that could attract more media attention.

 

So, he asked me to include a discussion of this at the upcoming Coaches’ Conference, an event that I had created for coaches and athletes and supporters to get together after the race season to discuss any improvements we thought were needed in the sport and generally swap training information if people so desired.

 

And I agreed with Richard that the World Cup idea had merit so I included it on the agenda for the Coaches' Conference. to be held in Llagollen, Wales and the British did a great job putting it on.

 

Although there were several other items on the agenda, World Cup quickly became the dominant one and we spent a lot of time on it.  Very quickly all the coaches and athletes and supporters in the room were in favor of the idea.   At lot of people wanted to speak so I had to do what they do in the US Congress and that is, ration speaking time.  I think I gave each person only a minute or two to speak and then we had to move on to the next speaker.  Some of them spoke in French, German, and Italian and I had to translate that for the others.

 

While all this was going on, people were ducking in and out of the meeting, making phone calls to race sites to create the schedule for the first World Cup that would be held the next year in 1988.  Phone calls were made to Canada, Augsburg, the Gull River in Canada, Wausau in the US, and other places to put together a schedule.

 

We formed a World Cup Promotion Committee with Richard Fox, me, Jaap Van Engers from the Netherlands, Eric Koechlin from France, and Gunter Brummer from Germany on it.  A couple of weeks later after I got home Jaap called me and asked if I would I be the president of the World Cup Promotion Committee.  Even though I was writing books and coaching our team, coaching Norman Bellingham in flat water Sprint, and arranging a 1988 kayaking exchange with the Soviet Union, I agreed to do it because I thought it was in the best interest of the sport.  So, for five years I was the president of it. 

 

One of the main issues was take advantage of the fact that 1988 was the year of the pre-World Championships for the 1989 World Championships to be held on in America on the Savage River.  So, European teams were going to be coming to North America anyway for that and so the transportation problem was solved.

 

Then it was a question of how to house and feed the athletes when they got here.  And for that we developed a "homestay program" where at least in North America, people were willing to house and feed athletes in individual homes.  That turned out to be a great success because it was like bringing the Olympics to people's homes -- they didn't even have to travel to be able to talk with athletes from Ireland or the Soviet Union or Germany or Italy.

 

I remember that a big problem, though, was that the ICF was not in favor of creating a World Cup. They were afraid that we were doing it in order to take the sport away from them.  And in fact, there was a faction within our group that wanted to do just that!  But I didn't want to do that because I didn't think it was in the best interest of the sport to divide it like that. 

 

So, I was always trying to make sure that what we did would ultimately win the support of the ICF.  I remember we had to spend a lot of time calming down Albert Woods and getting his support.

 

 The Germans were a particular problem (and to a lesser extent the Italians).  They just didn't want to have to pay the money to send their team to more events. And as with the ICF, they were afraid we were trying to take the sport away from them.  So, I had to make a special trip to Europe to speak with representative of the Deutsche Kanu-Verband about this.  It might have been Ulrich Feldhoff but I'm not sure.

 

Anyway, after the meeting he became less scared of what we were trying to do and saw that we were trying to finance it so that European teams coming to North America or other continents would have their financial problems addressed in terms of housing and feeding of the athletes.  So, I basically had his support to go ahead with the World Cup.

 

Then in 1988 we had the first World Cup.  We merged some events from the Europa Cup in with some races in North America and added a final to be held at Augsburg.  Someone --- maybe it was Richard Fox -- suggested that we make the final count double points in order to make sure everybody attended it, so we did that.  I think we had 7 races that first year. I still have the very first race bib of the very first World Cup racer, Vincent Radoux, hanging on my wall! 

 

It was a big success, in part because US athletes won 3 out of the four classes, so my federation was happy with me.   But more importantly, it had the support of all the athletes in the sport because they had a great time. (Also, Norm Bellingham won the Olympics that year.)

 

Right after the Augsburg race was over, I took Richard Fox, Myriam Jerusalmi, Cathy Hearn, Davey Hearn, Lecky Haller, and Jamie McEwan to the Soviet Union to initiate the kayak exchange.  It was there that I met Russian and Ukrainian athletes and coaches who I have stayed in touch with ever since, including now during the war in Ukraine.  And it was the beginning of my sympathy for Ukraine which has led to the project that Mike Corcoran and I are now undertaking to provide prosthetics for Ukrainian soldier amputees.  But that is a story for another day!

 

After the first year we continued to work on schedules that fit the normal travel patterns that athletes were going to have to do anyway in order to cut the costs of transportation and we continued to work on the home stay program in North America and other means for housing and feeding athletes at European races.  I got a fax machine from our national federation, which made communicating with Europe a lot easier.  We didn't have email then.  And the whole thing continued to be a big success.

 

I was the president of the World Cup Promotion Committee up through 1993, which was my last year coaching the US team.  I was pretty exhausted and shifted my attention to other things, such as helping get Bill Clinton reelected president of United States and then going to work in the White House for him.

 

So, that's my recollection of how it all came together.  Gunter Brummer and Eric Koechlin are now dead so we can't get their impressions. Eric Koechlin created the logo for the World Cup (it's a real shame not to have used it more, especially since today the World Cup doesn't have its own specific logo. Ettore said).  

I haven't talked with Jaap Van Engers since those days and I don't know if he is still alive or not.  Richard Fox I hear from once every few years and since he was a key instigator in the whole idea of forming a World Cup, you might want to talk to him as well.                                             

                                                         end first part... 

 

Bill Endicott  sulla sinistra con Fabien Lefevre