…or a heal, or just fall over.
But one thing is true, the more spectacular the tricks that are being attempted, the more spectacular the falls can be. So here are the likes of KSO, Small, Groen and many others at the WBC showing the world they are indeed human in this video that the WBC put together.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjK7TWaf1yE&w640&h385]
I like the one where the guy backfoots into the weeds.
This story from Chicago Now was forwarded to me Karen Putz who I previously mentioned on this site.
Glen Plake, an extreme downhill skier innovator, recently visited Keith St. Onge at the World Barefoot Center to do some barefooting. Be sure to read the whole story on Chicago Now.
About 1 month ago (Nov 1-6), the World Barefoot Center run be Keith St Onge and David Small (both world champion barefooters) held a women’s week at their school. In a sport normally dominated by men, this week the school was overrun by women.
Karen Putz (previously featured here) attended a did a story for Chicago Now. Be sure to read it and check out all of the pictures. There are also links to her personal blog in the story with even more details from the week.
Just wanted to pass on a few more details about the upcoming World Barefoot Center Figure-8 Barefoot Championship that’ll be taking place in Winter Haven, Florida on Saturday, October 16 on Lake Silver.
The entry fee is $65 with registration starting at 7am, the skiers meeting at 730am and the tournament starting at 8am. The tournament will pay out $1000 for first place, $500 for second and $200 for third.
Typical figure-8 rules that follow the Footstock rule book with the exception of the ropes being on a standard tower. No duct tape or Ultimate Grip Clinchers or Masterline Pro Lock gloves.
Seeing as how it’s at the WBC, you’ll likely be competing against KSO, David Small and the rest of the staff from there.
A party will follow at 7:30pm at the WBC Headquarters located at 3915 Lake Conine Dr. East in Winter Haven and the flyer indicates FREE BEER!!!
Check out the WBC website for more details and contact info. It’s also the final stop on barefoot ski dot com’s Figure-8 Barefoot Series.
Click on the image below to embiggen the flyer…
Update 9/25/2010: The figure-8 tournament will be held on Lake Silver now. My understanding it’s a private lake so there won’t be any weekend warriors to deal with.
Here’s some more great runs from Footstock 2010.
The first one features Jeremy Petrie (right) against Luke Bruckner (left) as Jeremy fights to maintain his grip on the handle, re-gripping it many times. Luke wins and goes on to take 6th. Jeremy wins 8th. There’s a lot of re-gripping going on. This video starts after they already made one eight.
Footstock – Jeremy Petrie vs Luke Bruckner
The next features Dan Ehlers, who is hailed as the comeback story of the year at Footstock, who after 21 years took 4th place, versus Keith St Onge, one of the world’s very best barefooters.
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.
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
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.
A group of footers from around the world gathered in Eau Claire, Wisconsin this past summer to some serous footers. The list of footer includes the De Villiers, Chris Morrison, and Keith St. Onge. In addition to the names you’d know, the video also features Brady Guth, Kyle Erickson and Luke Dallagrana.
Enjoy…
The new issue of the Wisconsin WaterSkier showed up in my mailbox today. Flipping through the Official Publication of the Wisconsin Water Skiing Federation I was pleasently surprised to find several articles by barefooters for barefooters in it. Typically you’re lucky to find one article about barefooting in a water skiing magazine.
The issue is primarily focus on the details of the Wisconsin Water Skiing Expo and Convention (previously called Think Tank) with details on all of the various sessions available. But towards the back of the book there are three good barefooting articles.
The first barefooting article is by Jamie Kunlien. He recently just competed at Worlds in New Zealand and in the summer is a member of the Janesville Rock Aqua Jays (a show ski team in Wisconsin). His article went through many good things to think about when going to a barefooting school, or any type of water skiing instruction, and really any type of instruction in general. He wrote about what you need to do be an Active Learner. There’s a lot there that seems obvious, but it is worth everyone’s time to read it. You can apply it to a lot more than just barefooting.
The second article is by Paul MacDonald, also a world class barefooter. His article is about how to dryland train for barefooting. This is a good article for those of us in the frozen north because even if we do get out on the lake, we’re probably ice fishing right now. He goes through several things to work on when you’re not on the water and how they’ll translate to making you better on the water.
The third and final article is by Dave Small, yet another world class barefooter. His article talks about how to do a tumble turn. It’s a simple trick and his explanation is yet another rephrasing of every other explanation of how to do a tumble turn. It wasn’t anything new, but hearing everyone give a consistent explanation means it must be the right way to explain it.
Finally, for those of you looking for something to do the weekend of February 27th thru March 1st, come to Wisconsin Dells for the Water Skiing Expo. They’ll be several sessions about barefooting with topics about goals, driving, how to practice, stretching, figure-8 competition (by KSO), back deeps, 3-event (by KSO), and about what barefooting can teach you about life.
I know I’ll be attending some of these sessions, as well as many other sesssions about show skiing. This year one of my goals for Think Tank is to do less 12-ounce curls on Friday night. 🙂 I hope to meet some of you there. Ask around for Wedge. There are lots of people that know who I am.
Mad-City Wedge 