Rodeo for dough: Top, a man-made hole called Smiley's, on Tennessee's Ocoee River, hosts the U.S. Freestyle Team Trials, seven weeks after the season's first rodeo at Rock Island State Park. Above, Byrd (with cup) and Ludden, in Cleveland, Tennessee, get their morning java the day after a rough outing. Below, freestyler Andrew Holcombe attempts a trick called the split wheel on the Ocoee.

John Goodman (3)

Most old-school kayak competitions involve flatwater sprints of 500 and 1,000 meters, and slalom, in which the object is to thread gates as you paddle through rapids. In freestyle kayaking, the object is to do as many tricks as you can in 45 seconds. Ten judges score each ride. Three count every 180-degree rotation, assign it a "technical score" (one, two, or four points based on how vertical the kayak's end gets), and call out the results in rapid succession; two more judges assess the "variety score" by identifying and calling each distinct trick. These have preassigned values based on difficulty. The remaining five judges transcribe the points as they're called out. At the end of the heat, all the raw scores are brought to a crash-prone laptop and crunched. Each competitor's total technical score is multiplied by his total variety score. To this is added a "style score" based on a percentage (zero to ten percent) of a paddler's total number of points. At Rock Island, a score of 356 will get you into the finals. (If this leaves you scratching your head, you're not the first).

At Rock Island, three bleach-blond junior paddlers sit on a podium holding flags tied to branches that someone must have just pulled out of the woods. The green flag means start your 45-second run, yellow means 15 seconds left, and red signals time's up. You can understand why they call it a rodeo: The object is to stay in the hole, which, in the preliminary rounds, nearly all of the competitors fail to do.

According to the American Whitewater Affiliation, the first freestyle competition was held on the Salmon River near Stanley, Idaho, in 1976. Before then, most paddlers went into holes only by accident, often backward or sideways while paddling frantically to escape. A technique for getting out of a hole yielded the first freestyle move—the ender, pushing the nose of your boat into the water and waiting for the river to spit you out like a pumpkin seed.

Back in the late seventies, kayaks were 13 feet long, fiberglass, and often homemade. They were fast but hard to turn. To improve maneuverability, boats were shortened. Meanwhile Easley, South Carolina–based Perception popularized kayaks made of durable plastic. Unlike the fiberglass shells, the plastic ones can take serious gymnastic abuse.

As boats have made tricks easier, the maneuvers that a rodeo star must perform have multiplied. Witness the air blunt, a 180-degree twist off the crest of a hydraulic; the pinwheel, which involves flipping end over end off a waterfall; the kick flip, launching off a wave into a jet-fighter spin. Different conditions favor different moves. At Rock Island, variations on the cartwheel theme are the bread and butter of the 45-second ride.

A colorful lexicon of wipeouts has developed along with the sport. To be "windowshaded" is to drop your upstream edge only to be rolled over again and again at the speed of a window shade that's been pulled down, let go, and is flapping at the top. To be "chunkered" is to get flipped and washed out the back end of the hole like you're being flushed down a toilet. "You start agro," says Ludden, "and then about two-thirds of the way through you become more conservative because you're out of breath, swallowing water, and you start to worry about getting worked."

Ludden doesn't do so well at Rock Island. He manages mostly flat spins, failing to get the tips of his kayak vertical—the difference between scores of one and four points. Though he stays in the hole for 35 of the 45 seconds, he fails to make the finals.

These are held the same afternoon. Ludden watches from shore. It comes down to Jimmy Blakeney, 28, the chairman of the U.S. Freestyle Kayak Committee; Dan Gavere, 30, a ten-year rodeo veteran; and Dave Garringer, a 21-year-old from Ramsey, West Virginia. Gavere flushes out almost immediately but scrambles back up into the hole to rack up more points. Garringer flushes out too but can't get back before the red flag; he finishes third. Blakeney survives his first ride, and in the ultimate round he and Gavere put on a mesmerizing show. No one in the crowd can tell who won, but the judges give the victory to Blakeney.

"I used to judge, but now I wouldn't feel comfortable," says Ludden, who feigns nonchalance about that morning's performance but admits it was "below average, a tough one to start the year with."

For now, Ludden can afford to shrug off missing the finals. Freestyle has no official rankings, and weekend to weekend any one of 25 paddlers may win a gold medal, something the obscure scoring system guarantees. Ludden's sponsorship has as much to do with cleaning up nice and being a role model as it does with winning. And yet that may be the very thing that changes if the sport blows up.