2 Vie for Domination in Women’s Ski Racing

In water skiing, there’s fast and then there’s really fast.

For recreational skiers, fast is spraying a shimmering cascade of water during a leisurely glide across a lake, followed by a cool dunk at ride’s end.

For ski racers, fast means a violent 90-mph encounter between burning leg muscles and a surface more akin to unyielding concrete than liquid, where a moment’s loss of concentration could mean death.

Two of the nation’s fastest women water ski racers are 17-year-old Tami Kahn and 44-year-old Debbie Nordblad, both of Ventura County.

The two are vying for domination of what might be called the Rodney Dangerfield of sports, for all the respect it commands. Even in the water ski community, racing is seen as something of a maverick event, unencumbered by the technical rules that pervade trick and jump skiing, said Dusty Schulz, captain of the U.S. world championship team.

Nordblad is the sport’s grand dame, an eight-time national champion and two-time individual world champion. She is also a three-time winner of the Long Beach-to-Catalina event, her winning time of 59 minutes and 8 seconds last year marking the first time in the race’s almost half-century history that a woman had completed the course in less than an hour. This year, Nordblad lost after hitting a boat wake even before reaching the open sea.

In the same race on Aug. 10, Kahn took the overall women’s title, after the grueling 62-mile round-trip trek she first competed in as a 50-pound, 4-foot-2-inch 9-year-old.

Both learned to ski before they could swim--Nordblad won the first race she competed in at the tender age of 8. Kahn and Nordblad believe that Tami broke Debbie’s record as the youngest-ever participant in the Long Beach-Catalina race, although even younger people have since competed in the event.

There are perhaps 800 water ski racers in the country, mostly in the western states.

And this year, Nordblad and Kahn--two of the three female starters on the national team--have finished in the top three in every race.

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Unlike the 100,000 paying spectators that attend Europe’s most prestigious races, crowds here are confined to racers’ families. Sponsorship--even for top racers such as Kahn and Nordblad--is almost nonexistent.

Nordblad, who has won every race in the nation and traveled the world in search of competition, chafes at toiling in a Thousand Oaks dental office to raise the $20,000 needed to compete in just one season. Laboring in obscurity, she wonders how many other national team members must raise $5,600 for the privilege of representing the United States at a world championship.

“It totally frustrates me,” Nordblad said of water ski race coverage, compared with that of other sports. “You just wonder why they get all this press and television coverage.”

Her frustration is expressed in other ways too, such as when she commented to a journalist after a race how difficult it is for her to compete against racers who don’t even have to do their own laundry.

Kahn responded to the thinly veiled jab by saying she does her own chores.

Although the pair are friendly, there is no mistaking their rivalry.

Kahn is an emerging force in the sport.

In 1995 she became the first-ever girl’s junior world champion.

Aside from a rigorous daily training schedule and an obsession with speed, the two have little in common.

The dark-haired and muscular Nordblad exudes a quiet confidence. Her racing style mirrors her strength, carving through water by sheer force, said Cheryl Ruston, business manager with the La Palma-based National Water Ski Racing Assn.

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Kahn, the prototypal tanned California blond, is quick to laugh and possesses a degree of self-confidence that verges on the brash. To celebrate her triumph in the Long Beach-Catalina race this year, Kahn bungee jumped 220 feet off the dock in front of the Queen Mary’s bow. She spends a lot of time airborne in a race as well, Ruston said, bouncing off the crests of waves.

“You don’t have time for fear,” Kahn said, “I just shut out that part in my mind. . . . I know what I can and can’t do.”

Kahn’s goal is a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records by breaking the 111 mph women’s water ski speed record. The mark was set more than 20 years ago in Long Beach by a racer used parachutes to slow her down in the same manner as a drag racer. The men’s record is more than 150 mph.

Ruston and Schulz both wince at the aspiration.

There is no sanctioning body prepared to endorse such a feat in a sport that is already dangerous enough. Three ski racers have died in the last five years in the United States alone.

“She doesn’t express any fear, and as team captain I have a hard time dealing with some of that,” Schulz said of Kahn.

Not that Kahn, who plans to major in electrical engineering at UC Santa Barbara this fall, hasn’t had her share of spills.

Once she fell at more than 80 mph, the force of the spill battering her body despite the helmet, head and arm restraints and other safety gear that racers wear.

“I had a black eye for two months,” she said matter-of-factly. “I looked like one of the dogs with a black patch over one eye.”

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She was lucky. Ruston stopped breathing last year after falling while leading the national championship. She spent several days in intensive care and now has three titanium plates embedded in her skull.

Nordblad allows that she is more cautious than Kahn, prodded by her family responsibilities.

“Besides her, no one beat me last year,” Kahn said. “She’s been at the top for a long time, I’ve been escalating for a long time. . . . We both want to be the best and there’s only one spot.”

Nordblad sees it that way too.

“Every world championship for the past two or three, I’ve said this is it,” Nordblad said, “mainly because it’s getting harder to fit it all in. . . . I play just as hard as the kids do. One of these years, I’m going to grow up.”