On MSNBC right now, they’re showing the U.S. Olympic kayaking trials from Charlotte, N.C. If you’ve been to Charlotte, you might find that strange, considering that there’s no serious whitewater anywhere near the city (you’ve got to drive several hours into the mountains for that). Or at least there wasn’t until two years ago, when a a nonprofit group finished building a manmade whitewater course about 15 minutes from downtown.
I covered the development of the whitewater park — now called the U.S. National Whitewater Center — from the initial proposals up until its construction and opening, a process that took about six years. My first story about the whitewater park back in 2000 — the first time anyone had written about it — started off like this: “It sounds far-fetched: an artificial whitewater river … uptown. But it’s an idea that has all the right people interested, from the country’s largest bank to the Mecklenburg County parks department to the U.S. Olympic kayaking team.”
It turns out that the uptown component of the plan was far-fetched. The park’s backers couldn’t find a parcel of center city land big enough for the course, so instead they settled on a large swath of land already owned by the Mecklenburg County Parks Department near the Catawba River. The whitewater park became the centerpiece of a plan to build an entire outdoor adventure center. Construction finally began in 2005, and the park opened the next year, right around the time I left Charlotte for New York City. But I got to write stories about the opening and helped create this cool poster explaining how it all works. When I went back to visit a few months later, I took my first run down the river that I had covered for years. Of course, I fell out of the raft.
Things haven’t been entirely smooth for the whitewater park builders, either. They’ve had controversy and money problems. But watching Olympic hopefuls kayak down the rapids on TV right now, you can’t help but admire the vision that they were able to make a reality — no matter how rough the water was along the way.
