She Stays Afloat With a Little Help From Friends, Family

Only one person currently residing in Lake Placid, N.Y., refers to Cathy Marino as “Mom.”

It’s not any of her teammates on the U.S. canoe and kayak team. They wouldn’t dare.

While Marino, 34, is six years older than the average age of her teammates, her skills as a kayaker make it difficult to tag her with maternal nicknames.

After all, no athlete wants to admit they might get beat by someone they call “Mom.”

The one person who uses the term is the one who’s supposed to: Jared, Marino’s 2-year-old son. He has been in Lake Placid with Marino since the U.S. team began training there in early June.

“I couldn’t be away from him that long, so I brought him with me,” said Marino, a Huntington Beach resident. “I’ve rented an apartment here for us to stay in and my parents are with us, too. They take care of Jared while I’m training.”

Marino pays for the apartment on her own while the rest of the U.S. team is housed expense-free at the Lake Placid Olympic training center.

A 1975 graduate of Fountain Valley High, Marino was Orange County’s first female firefighter (in Orange in 1981) and currently works for the Long Beach fire department. As a single mother, Marino receives assistance from a number of sources that enable her to juggle her career, family life and kayak training.

“I couldn’t be an Olympic athlete without the support I’ve gotten,” Marino said. “My parents, the fire department, the team--everyone’s always been willing to help me out to make sure I got to do something I wanted to do.”

Most Olympic dreams start at an early age, but Marino didn’t compete in sports at Fountain Valley. She was a cheerleader.

It wasn’t until she saw the film “The Other Side of the Mountain,” a story of aspiring Olympic skier Jill Kinmont who was paralyzed in a training accident but went on to become a teacher, that Marino, who was 24 at the time, decided to pursue the Olympics.

“The movie motivated me and made me think, ‘Hey, I’d really like to go to the Olympics,’ ” Marino said. “I had paddled outrigger canoes and surf skis for a long time, so I figured kayaking would be my best bet.”

She was right. Within a year after she started kayak training, Marino was a double gold medalist at the 1982 U.S. nationals and finished sixth in singles at the 1983 world championships. Her efforts and rapid improvement led to her being named the U.S. canoe and kayak team’s female athlete of the year in 1983.

Marino’s interest in competitive kayaking has been sporadic from the start. She didn’t participate in the 1984 Los Angeles Games, and then didn’t compete at all between 1985-87.

During that time, in addition to her work as a firefighter, she was the cheerleading instructor at Corona del Mar High, where her brother, Mike, is a psychology teacher. About a year before the 1988 Seoul Games, Marino returned to kayaking.

Marino made the U.S. team and finished seventh in the two-man, 500-meter event with Sheila Conover and was a member of the four-man team that finished ninth. At the 1990 U.S. nationals, she earned most valuable woman paddler honors after winning four gold medals.

Marino believes that being older is an advantage in kayaking, a sport in which technique plays a major role.

“The average age of our team is 28, and I think we’re all better paddlers than we were four years ago,” Marino said. “Personally, the training for Barcelona is going way better for me than Seoul. I’m 1.5 seconds faster than I was and I’ve had my personal best time this year.”