By Roy M. Wallack
Think snowboarding on water. Think waterskiing gone wild. Think the hottest-growing sport on H2O, and you’ve got wakeboarding, which hits Fiesta Island in San Diego’s Mission Bay for three days of collegiate competition starting Friday.
Developed in the late 1980s, wakeboarding involves riding a wakeboard (think hydrodynamic snowboard with fins) on the surface of the water behind a boat that’s towing it anywhere from 18 to 25 mph. Carving and edging like a snowboarder, tightening and slackening the rope to gain momentum, the wakeboarder slashes around and through the boat’s trailing wakes, eventually launching off them to catch air and perform tricks.
“You’ve got 540 degree spins, 720 spins, rotations, inverts, Raley tricks, which is like doing a Superman—it’s basically gymnastics in the water,” says Fabian Ashley, a 25-year-old student and top-ranked wakeboarder at the University of North Carolina who serves as the executive director for collegiate board of USA Wakeboarding. “And we’re still on the learning curve.”
The catalog of tricks in wakeboarding can fill a small dictionary. A tiny sampler of the most common ones you’re likely to hear:
·Butterslide: The rider turns the board 90 degrees and grinds the wake.
·Body Slide: The rider lies all the way back onto the water.
·Potato Peeler: A Body Slide with a fin release.
·Powerslide: Board is turned backside 90 degrees in the flats. Done correctly, a huge spray results.
·Surf Carve: Rider cuts back and forth in the wake in a surf-carving fashion.
·Ollie: A bunny-hop out of the water.
·Baller: During a spin, when a rider passes the handle between his legs.
·Off-Axis: When a rider does a spin but goes off the vertical axis so the board usually gets up to shoulder level or above.
·Ole: When a rider rotates with the handle above his head, not passing the handle.
When wakeboarding was first invented, its dynamics seemed to beg for stunts, and competitions quickly arose throughout the early 1990s. It was made for the media; No one was surprised when wakeboarding was added as a competitive sport in the HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Games"X Games II in the late 1990s—and that the boats that pull the boarders continued to get more radical and more powerful. “Special wakeboard boats make bigger wakes,” says Ashley. “Epic Wakeboard Boats came out with an electric hybrid boat that can hold the wakeboarder higher in the air.”
Pushing one another to the limit for three days at the Alt Games will be wakeboarders from up to 16 of the approximately 40 U.S. colleges that compete in the sport, including the following: The University of Florida at Gainesville, the 2008 champion; Texas A & M, last year’s runner-up; Rollins College of Florida; Sacramento State, which has several athletes on the pro tour; California’s Chico Sate Univers, Arizona Sate, which got a wildcard entry; and Virginia Tech, famous for their stunts at Smith Mountain Lake, a popular Southern wakeboarding scene.
Who are the favorites? “I won’t make predictions, but I will say that the southern teams have the advantage, because their warm weather allows them to train,” says Ashley. “Some of the northern teams haven’t ridden at all before the tournament.”
What does it take to win? “Learning from your mistakes,” says Ashley. “Make mistakes early, and don’t make them again. And consistency counts, because after two falls, it’s over. You get picked up by the boat and taken back to the dock for good.
Finally there’s the fatigue factor. Other events at the Alt Games are over in a very long day, but the wakeboarding competition is three very long, hot days in the sun. Her advice: Bring sun block, a bonnet, and your best game— and that’s if you’re a spectator. For the competitors, a few jaw-dropping tricks will help, too.
