U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL: ORANGE COUNTY’S DAY : LOS ANGELES 1991 : As a Group, Kayakers Clean Up : Canoeing: The team from Newport Aquatic Center wins gold medals in all five finals staged Saturday.

The Olympic Festival has never been a competition that emphasizes team standings. Individual achievement and development, organizers say, count far more than the final point tallies of North, South, East or West.

But at Saturday’s canoe/kayak competition at Ballona Creek, it was apparent that one team--one that had no particular regional allegiance--was out-paddling all the rest.

It was the Newport Aquatic Center canoe and kayak team, a squad of native and transplanted Orange Countians that consists of some of the best paddlers in the United States.

NAC showed its strength Saturday, winning gold medals in all five finals.

Jim Terrell of Newport Beach, the all-time Festival medal leader, won golds in the men’s single 1,000 meters and the men’s double 1,000 meters (teaming with Stewart Carr of Indianapolis), giving him a total of 25 medals in nine Festival appearances.

Mitch Kahn, a firefighter from San Clemente, fared equally well in men’s kayak, winning the singles 1,000 and doubles 1,000 (with partner Patrick Richardson of La Jolla).

And former Olympian Cathy Marino of Huntington Beach won the only women’s final of the day, the singles 500, finishing an impressive five seconds ahead of runner-up Deanne Hemmens of San Diego.

All together, NAC captured eight of 15 medals possible, making a happy man of NAC canoe and kayak director Jirka Batlik. Although the Aquatics Center opened three years ago, it wasn’t until January that Batlik took the job as its first formal director.

Now, with a growing junior program and a first-rate facility (well, at least by American paddling standards), NAC hopes to be chosen as one of the nation’s “centers of excellence,” a program funded by the U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Canoe and Kayak Team.

“We are going to be the top paddling center in the country soon,” said Batlik, a former world-class canoeist from Czechoslovakia and husband of Olympic kayaker Shirley Dery-Batlik.

“We’ve got some great people helping us out and the enthusiasm is higher than it’s ever been.”

Asked to name sports that are indigenous to Orange County, most sports fans would probably first point to volleyball and surfing. But Batlik hopes area residents soon realize what tremendous talent they have paddling around the bays and inlets of Newport Harbor.

Actually, the talent has been around for years, Batlik says, but, unlike before, the organization is now available to the athletes. The NAC facility, located at the edge of the west side of the Upper Back Bay, was financed in part by private donations and the Amateur Athletic Federation. The City of Newport Beach donated the land, Batlik said.

“I remember when we used to be over at the UC Irvine boat house, we used to keep our boats in tents,” said Marino, perhaps the county’s most veteran female kayaker. “The whole thing is so much better now. We have a weight room, a storage place for boats, our own dock . . . It’s great.”

Add that to the miles of waterways through Newport Harbor--important for preventing boredom--and the pleasant weather, and Batlik says this is the mecca for which many paddlers search.

Brothers Fred and David Spaulding moved from Ventura to train at NAC, as did many others. In the fall, paddlers from colder parts of the world, especially Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany, migrate to Newport for the winter.

Batlik, who put up an International Recognition Board in NAC’s halls to show where the foreign guests come from, said this year he expects paddlers from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary to come as well.

“They used to always go to Cuba to train for the winter,” Batlik says. “Now they’re coming here.”

And some are starting to take notice, especially the younger crowd. Batlik started a juniors program in March, expecting five or 10 children to join. He now has 35. Two weeks ago, with the help of the AAF, he put on a free juniors paddling clinic. More than 80 youngsters attended.

Sam Couch, who will be a senior at Newport Harbor High in the fall, and Batlik’s 15-year-old cousin, Vaclav Batlik, are two of the junior program’s rising stars. Both say they enjoyed other sports, but they thought they could go further in kayak or canoe.

“I swam for seven years, but I decided I’d have a better chance to go further in canoeing,” Couch said. “And I met Jimmy Terrell. That helps a lot.”