Backwoods Tennessee charm keeps Dickert rolling
By Boo Turner
Outside Online correspondent

There they were, in their faces at dawn, squawking and flapping wildly about, feathers flying, terrorized after being foisted into the cabins at Camp Ocoee.

For Wayne Dickert, the poultry prank was a fine way to open the eyes of his sleepy paddling pals that morning a dozen years ago.

Those alarming chickens became dinner later that day. Standing in front of his appalled but fascinated city slicker friends, Dickert wrangled the chickens' necks, or slit their throats against a log stump with a pocket knife.

Wayne Dickert is the genuine article: a Tennessee boy born and raised in McDonald, just a tad downstream from the fantastic Olympic whitewater venue where he'll be racing July 28.

When Dickert and his tandem canoe (C-2) partner Horace Holden, an Atlanta native, took to those same waters in May to aim for the one and only U.S. Olympic berth in this event, their odds were about as good as the odds those chickens had.

But in a stunning and flawless race, they upset brothers Fritz and Lecky Haller--who were favored but fumbled--and it's taken a while for Dickert to come down off the cloud of elation that followed his unexpected victory.

"I'm starting to figure out that I'm actually on the Olympic team," Dickert said recently. "I have a whole closet full of stuff now. There's the rainsuit, the parade suit, the award suit, the blue jeans--but these are white--the rain jacket suit, ... oh, good gracious, a bunch of other stuff, too. You've got something with Olympic rings for any occasion," he concludes with a long drawl.

Along with the boxer shorts, he's also got his Olympic identification badge. One of 10,000 athletes going to the Games, Dickert--at age 37--is one of the "pillars of maturity" on the U.S. whitewater squad. But you wouldn't guess it from his badge. It took several tries (and instant computerized imaging) for Dickert to win the goofiest photo contest over teammate Scott Shipley. "How many people can make a face like that?" he asked.

And then there is the deluge of interview requests to confirm that, yes sirree, Wayne Dickert, the only Boy Scout in his troop that didn't earn his canoeing merit badge (or so he says), is going to the Olympics.

Inevitably, the question the uninitiated often ask--about winning the Games--comes up.

"I just give them the ol' Budweiser line," said Dickert. "'YES, WE WILL. Whatever you say,'" he laughs.

Dickert knows he can say whatever he pleases, and he does. But the question persists: Can they do it?

"I think we have the talent to be right up there," he said. "It will be a matter of how everyone else does. If we have the race of our lives, we have a shot at a medal. But I don't know," he admitted with a pause and then an honest guffaw, "we've already had the race of our lives."

For Holden and Dickert, that race--team trials--came after just six months of training together, on top of the 40 or so years of paddling experience they've jointly amassed. In 1991, they paired up to aim for one of three spots on the '92 Olympic Team, and came close. A controversial penalty--not awarded to the team of Joe Jacobi and Scott Strasbaugh--left Holden and Dickert as alternates. After that, Wayne retired, but the lure of the Olympics on the Ocoee (and his buddy Horace's need for a new sternman) was too much to resist.

"What's always impressed me the most about them," said Bunny Johns, president of Nantahala Outdoor Center where Dickert directs the Nantahala Racing Club, "is they have such a good time in the boat."

"I myself think they have tradition in their favor," said Johns. That is to say, whitewater slalom--in the Games for its third time--has no Olympic tradition. "I think they're gonna surprise everybody," she concluded.

Having never won an international race, Dickert and Holden can aim only to have their best performance, as plucky and satisfying as the one that put them on the Olympic team. In the end, Dickert said he wants to know "that I did something well at something I like to do."

Boo Turner is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest. She is a former U.S. National Team member in whitewater kayaking.