Tag: heller

2010 Footstock Results – The Porn Star Wins!

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Based on the multitude of posts showing up on my Facebook News Feed, I’m pretty sure these are official…

First place went to Mark “The Porn Star” Donahue who beat the legend Peter Fleck in a record breaking 5-1/4 Figure-8s’s to take the title of 2010 Footstock Champion! Earlier in the day, Fleck had beaten Donahue to become the last undefeated footer, putting Donahue into the loser’s bracket.

Rounding out the top three was Keith St Onge. Dan Ehllers took fourth, Chris Van Zeeland took fifth, Luke Brukner took sixth and Josh Bruns took seventh.

The last four unbeaten footers were Van Zeeland (he put KSO in to the loser’s bracket), Ehllers, Donahue and Fleck.

Based on the Facebook Status Updates provided by Gary Mueller on the Footstock page, it sounds like Donahue beat KSO with a run longer than 4-1/2 fig-8s to advance to the finals. He then had to beat Fleck twice. The first run was the record breaking 5-1/4 fig-8 and the second run was 3-1/2 fig-8s. Counting all of those fig-8’s up, the Porn Star did 13-1/4 figure-8’s to beat two of the best barefooters in the world.

In the Seniors Division, Peter Fleck took first, Mark Donahue took second and The Mule, Bob Mahnke, took 3rd.

In the Junior Division, Sam Landgraf took first, Nich Ruchti took second, Jake Wiedemeier took third, Jake Smith took fourth and Blake Pluemer took fifth.

Elaine Heller took 1st in the Women’s Division. And from the sounds of it, there were more than a couple pink shirts handed out in the Open Division.

If I’ve made any mistakes, please let me know and I’ll get the story updated. If you have video, pictures, whatever, let me know, I’d like to get it out to the barefooting world.

US Nationals Results

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In now somewhat old news that has been published everywhere*, Keith St. Onge and Elaine Heller won their respective Open Pro Divisions, both sweeping the titles in slalom (19.7 and 13.4), trick (12,450 and 3060) and jump (84 feet and 61 feet) (respectively).

For more scores, you can check out the full USA Water Ski Press Release and at least for the time being, you can find all of the scores here (via the ABC website).

On a related note, I did get to watch a little bit of the webcast of this event that the World Barefoot Center did. Not the slickest production I’ve seen, but they are aware of that and are working on making it better (when I watched, there was a kid posing in the background). Yes, there were a couple small technical hick-ups, but nothing major. What I did like was the live feed from the boat to show each person’s runs. You could see exactly what the judges could see with a view right from the boat. I was only able to watch for a little bit on Saturday morning and watched a 82 year old and 75 year old do their trick runs. (I hope I’m still able to barefoot at their ages.) Swampy did a good job describing what he was seeing, estimating their scores, describing why somethings counted and why some didn’t. I give MAD PROPS to the WBC for making this happen. I’m sure they made countless peoples’ days by enabling them to watch their friends and family compete at Nationals. I can’t wait to see what they do next time.

*everywhere that publishes barefoot water skiing results

Barefoot Chick Fest is Set for June 19

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In the most recent issue of the Wisconsin Water Skier (a WWSF publication) on the inside cover there is ad announcing the Barefoot Chick Fest that will be taking place at the Blue Moo Lake near Alma Center, WI on Saturday, June 19 this year. The website is listed as www.BarefootChickFest.com but as of this writing, there are no details there. Another site to look for details is www.cowzrus.net. As of this writing, there aren’t any more details other than to save the date.

For those that don’t know, the Blue Moo Lake is run by the Heller family who have several very accomplished barefoot skiers that competed successfully at the 2008 Worlds Barefoot Championships in New Zealand. Needless to say, they know a little something about barefooting.

Worlds & Nats

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The main reason for a new post is my google alerts found a nice article on the Heller girls.  They recently competed at the World Games in Taiwan and did very well with Elaine taking the gold and Shannon the bronze. Quite an accomplishment for two sisters.  They also competed at the US Nationals a couple weeks later taking gold and silver.  (article)  One thing that helped a lot is Elaine is now using the inverted jumping style and is currently the only woman using that type of jump. Basically, you fly through the air like superman (or woman) and fly a hell of a lot farther.

I can’t find a source to back this up, but I remember seeing a USA Water Ski post go through my RSS reader about Keith St. Onge winning gold at Worlds and I know he also won gold at Nationals as well as set a pending trick record. (article)

Here’s a link with all of the Nationals results.

Finally… a little teaser. Keep an eye on here for a pretty sweat barefoot video (or two) coming soon. Camera work kinda sucks and the view point isn’t that great, but the trick is more than kick ass and makes up for the poor camera work and bad perspective.