I conducted a poll of various mission statements for slalom, on the uswtaf chat page, but as they say in the polling biz, my methodology was flawed. I want to try again.

What's the proper goal for a new slalom initiative? (Assuming for the moment there can be some such thing.) On my first try, I threw out a number of overlapping statements that nevertheless managed to leave important possibilities uncovered. In my own mind I was focusing on three main possibilities:

1. Winning (with honor).
2. Participation, spreading the joy of slalom competition.
3. Winning through increased participation.

I favored # 3, and though the poll showed plenty of support for #1, the majority of those responding chose some variant of #3, as well.

But note--I was making the unexamined assumption was that increased participation and increased winning necessarily go hand in hand. You'd think I'd never competed against the East Germans, to accept that sloppy paradigm. Heck, the US itself would never have done as well in international competition as it has, if that were true. Our numbers have always been far below England's, Germany's, and most especially France's. At the same time, it's clear that there's a participation threshold below which there just aren't enough athletes to keep the elite program alive. Most believe that the US has fallen below that threshold. Almost everyone I speak with wishes to boost participation--but they want to do so from different motives, and therefore necessarily through different strategies.

No one denies that if slalom had the popularity of basketball we'd have a healthier program--but that's not one of the available options. Some small sports, like luge, pass their athletes through a very patterned, controlled number of competitive stages, in which promising juniors, eventually, have all their expenses paid to live in Lake Placid during the winters, with tutors provided so they will not fall behind in school.

It can be dangerous to imitate other countries, or other sports. I alternate between asking myself "why isn't the sport doing better?" with, "How the heck are our athletes doing as well as they do?" By any objective comparison--number of participants, money in the program, number of paid coaches, etc.--US slalom outperforms its program by a large margin. How do we do that? In our rush to fix our weaknesses, let's be careful not to kill the source of our strengths.

Our greatest asset, I believe, is passion. Our coaches and athletes love the sport. The quality of the people involved is very high. Precisely because slalom in the US is tiny and disorganized, the people who bother to take it up really, really love to do it. And that passion goes a long way to making up for money, programs, opportunities. We know it can; it has.

Whitewater slalom is its own unique sport. It's a wet, messy, potentially dangerous, often uncomfortable sport--with elements of high technical mastery and unexpected beauty. My son Keith calls it "ballet for baddasses." That about sums it up.

What's the best way to improve the program without killing the passion?

By honoring that passion, wherever we find it.

A purely analytical, cut-and-dried approach to winning international medals would I think look like this: we would identify two or three national training centers and pour all of our resources into them. These centers should meet the following criteria:

1.Cooperative middle and high schools or school systems.

2. A choice of colleges and universities.

3. One very easy moving water site, one site of moderate difficulty, and one challenging high-quality training and racing site.

4. A permanent coaching staff with enough coaches to run an entry-level program, a junior program, and an elite program.

The rest of the country could then fend for itself. Which is, after all, exactly what it's doing right now. No one would be hurt--and some would gain.

Given the severe limitations of our resources, this might well be the best possible strategy for getting US racers on the World Championship and Olympic podiums. True, even the most elitist program needs to pay a certain amount of attention to participation. But if participation is purely a vehicle for feeding young athletes into the system, then the methods for promoting that participation will be different than if participation is an end in itself. Perhaps more importantly, the spirit of that promotion will be different.

It comes down to our basic assumptions about the appropriate role of sports in our lives. I expressed my own thoughts on this in an essay, "The Thrill of Defeat"; to boil them down, I believe that the end-user of sport is the individual athlete, and the final value lies in the high-quality experience that the athlete enjoys. Training and racing have to be worthwhile in themselves, not just as means to an end, because, one, very few of those who train and race win the high honors, and, two, because even those who do find that those honors do not impart happiness or immortality.

You could turn it all around, and see Olympic medals as a means to advertising the sport and thus spreading participation to a wider base. It hasn't worked that way--not at all--but it's possible to imagine that it could. And I think this is more compatible with my view of sport than the purely elitist approach.

But my final vote would be, that the national organization should have two goals. Participation is a goal--and winning international events is a goal. These goals are highly compatible, yes--but they are not identical. I think it helps to see that. Let's say that we feel confident that a particular, isolated program will never produce a single US team member--should we nevertheless support that program? Yes. At the potential detriment--and there are always limited resources--of the elite program? That's a balancing act--but, yes, even then, if we value participation in itself there are going to be times when we could do still more for the national team, and we choose not to in order to do more for participation.

Ninety-five percent of the time, of course, we will argue that increased participation will help the elite program--either by making the elite athlete feel supported by a thriving program and knowledgeable fans, or by providing them with the chance to earn money by giving clinics or making speeches, or by drawing future elite athletes into the "pipeline." But I believe that we should honor participation in itself. The most courageous paddler on the course is usually not the elite athlete who is quite comfortable out there; it's the paddler, young or old, who's out there for the first time, struggling, getting pinned, needing rescue. Let us honor that courage. Let us be grateful for his or her participation. Not just because it helps the elite--which it does--but because it's worthy of honor.

A side benefit is, that we might be able to heal a rift in the paddling community. Whether justified or not, it is a fact that racers are widely seen as elitist, self-absorbed, aloof. It would be healthier, I think, for racers to be seen as fellow paddlers who happen to be good at racing, and for racing to be seen as one way for any paddler to have a weekend of fun.