Smoke on the Water

In water skiing, there’s fast and then there’s 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, it is 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.

And Ventura County is home to two of the nation’s fastest racers: 17-year-old Tami Kahn, who graduated from Oxnard High School in June, and 44-year-old Debbie Nordblad, a Newbury Park mother of two.

“I’d like to think there’s something in the water, but I think it’s just a coincidence,” said Dusty Schulz, captain of the U.S. world championship team--which includes athletes of both genders--and a Westlake resident himself. “They’re among the world’s best as far as women speed racers are concerned. . . . They probably have 10 other women in the world on their level, if that.”

Kahn is an emerging force in the sport. In 1995 she became the first girls’ junior world champion and this year took the women’s title Aug. 10 in the annual Long Beach to Catalina event, a grueling 62-mile round-trip trek in which she first competed as a 50-pound, 4-foot, 2-inch 9-year-old.

“She has a very, very fierce desire to win, and for some reason I think she thinks she has a lot to prove,” Schulz said. “I think she’s proved a lot already . . . at that age.”

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. Last year, her winning time of 59 minutes, 8 seconds marked the first time in the race’s almost half-century history that a woman completed the course in less than an hour. This year, Nordblad lost after hitting a boat wake even before reaching the open ocean.

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Schulz predicts that Nordblad will wind up in the water ski Hall of Fame--if she ever retires.

“She hasn’t been out of the top three in the world ranking since stepping in in 1981,” he said. “She would rather go to the start line with all her gear on behind a 100-mph boat than anything else, outside of raising her two daughters. . . . I think Debbie gets a perverse pleasure out of beating women that are young enough to be her daughter.”

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

In 1996, in her first full season competing as an adult, Kahn won both the National Water Ski Racing Assn.’s 10-race marathon circuit and the regional championship in sprint races. Nordblad, who missed the first few events due to a foot injury, took the season-ending national sprint championship.

“Besides her, no one beat me last year,” said Kahn, biting into a piece of strawberry cheesecake at a local Denny’s, with Nordblad sitting beside her. “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 and Kahn 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, Schulz said.

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

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 a season needed to compete. 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.

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“It totally frustrates me,” Nordblad said of media interest in water ski racing 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.

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

But aside from their rigorous daily training schedules and an obsession with speed, the two have little in common.

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

Kahn, a prototypical tanned California blond who is quick to laugh, possesses a degree of self-belief that verges on brashness. 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. She spends a lot of time airborne in her races 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 earning a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records by breaking the 111-mph women’s world water ski speed record. The mark was set more than 20 years ago in Long Beach by a racer who wore parachutes to slow her down, in the manner of a drag racer.

Ruston and Schulz both wince at her aspiration.

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There is no sanctioning body prepared to endorse such a feat in a sport that’s already dangerous. Three ski racers have died over the past 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.

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 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.”

She was lucky. Ruston stopped breathing last year after falling while leading the national championship race. 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.

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She had hoped her elder daughter would make the junior water ski racing team this year, enabling the mother-daughter combo to compete together in the world championships, slated for Australia in October. But 12-year-old Lacey missed the cut.

“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.”