News
Wave Sport Open goes off!!
Release Date: 2004-10-01
First off, thanks to the 81 competitors who made this first annual Wave Sport Open possible! This was a huge turn-out considering it’s our first year, not to mention the Dries were running! Without the competitors it can’t happen, thanks for taking the minute or two at Pillow to sign in! Hope you had as much fun entering as we did throwing it!! Our goal was to throw an event that brings ALL paddlers together regardless of what kinda boat they paddle, to make it free and easy to enter, and most of all to have fun! Considering we had squirt boats, OC-1s (including Nolen Whitesell who killed it!!), freestyle boats, river runners, creek boats, long boats, C-1ers and even a Ducky, it’s probably safe to say it was the most diverse freestyle event ever!!
Big Thanks also to all who helped with the event, from the IQ Media filming crew to John Cornwells team to all the team Wave Sport athletes who helped out!!! Also thanks the Sheri at Natl Park Service for approving our permit to throw this event on the Gauley river.
Next I have to thank all of our sponsors for the support! Red Bull supplied beverages on the river as well as at the Wave Sport booth (along with some mixers, which were responsible for my fuzzy head!). The prize list looked like this: 7 Astral pfds, 14 pairs of Teva sandals, 2 AT4 paddles, a bunch of cool gear from Immersion Research, and BoaterTalk memberships…oh yeah, and $1,500 CASH!!! Prizes were given for 1st through 3rd place in all categories. Also thanks to Water Stone Outdoors (Kenny and Gene) for helping to set up the zip line across Pillow rapid. While we never ended up using it to film from, this test run gives us the necessary info to get it nailed for next years event!!
Hope everyone enjoyed the video at the Wave Sport booth. While we planned to start it at 9pm, George from IQ Media didn’t get out of the editing studio till 8:30pm (after we were up till 4:30am Friday night judging and logging footage, then George spent all day Saturday editing the video!) and got held up in traffic so didn’t make it to the event till 9:30pm. So we showed the IR Big Gun Show first, as always a great show!! Props to LVM for yet another great BGS! The only problem with this was the fact that at 9pm I was a bit buzzed but ready to emcee the awards and video with John Cornwell, but by the time the Low Life (the Low Life kicks ass!!) finished their first set around 11pm Cornwell and myself were broken, which made for some interesting emceeing for the awards and video…at least that’s what I was told, my recollection is smothered in a blurry haze :-)
Results will be in the NEWS section of Wave Sport shortly. We switched up some categories after the event to take advantage of all the cool stuff we saw out there. We ended up splitting the $1,500 in prize money among all the category winners and opted to drop the overall winners…it was just too tough to determine overall winners and wanted to spread the love. Be sure to stay tuned to the Wave Sport website for updates with VIDEO and PHOTOS. Also there will be a segment in LVM as well as a full DVD which will have at least one shot of all competitors. Thanks again to all and we can’t wait to make it bigger and better for 2005!!! Any feedback is appreciated so we can try to do this even better next year!!