Ocoee Whitewater Center - Olympic Slalom Course

Olympic Slalom Course

River flow through the Ocoee Whitewater Center is controlled by Ocoee Dam #3, two miles (3 km) upstream. Its hydroelectric power plant is located downstream from the Center, fed by a tunnel and penstock which carry all the water used for power generation, bypassing the section of river where the Whitewater Center is located. Consequently, all water for the Olympic course must be released directly into the river from Dam #3, bypassing the tunnel and penstock and forfeiting the production of 30 megawatts of electricity. This makes the Ocoee Olympic course the world's most expensive to operate, and is the chief reason it is no longer used for slalom training and competition. Only the commercial rafting industry can afford the water.

For 54 years, from 1942, when the dam was built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, until 1996, when the Olympic Games came to Atlanta, the Upper Ocoee, a 3.5 mi (5.6 km) section of Ocoee riverbed between Dam #3 and its powerhouse, was dewatered except during flood control releases, usually during the winter and spring. For twenty years from 1976 to 1996, whitewater rafting on the Middle Ocoee just downstream, between Dam #2 and its powerhouse, had attracted attention to the area. The availability of the Upper Ocoee as a dry construction site during the summer greatly aided the creation of an Olympic slalom course in the riverbed.

A 1-to-10 scale model of the riverbed, with water, was constructed outdoors near the base of Ocoee Dam #1 to test the effect of the proposed course design. The 1.9% slope of the river (99 ft/mile, 19 meters/km) is typical of Olympic courses, but, because the narrowed river is still much wider than a typical artificial slalom channel, the required streamflow (1560 cubic feet/second, 44 m³/s) is two to three times greater than usual.

Construction of the course was a pivotal event in the history of Olympic whitewater. The first Olympic whitewater competition took place during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, using the world's first artificial slalom course, the Eiskanal in nearby Augsburg, as the venue. Because of the expense of course construction, the next four Summer Olympic Games were held without whitewater events. In 1992, for the Barcelona games, an artificial slalom course, Parc Olímpic del Segre, was constructed in the nearby Pyrenees mountains, using natural streamflow supplemented by pump-driven recirculation.

After 1992, because of construction expense, the future of Olympic whitewater events was once again in question. Had they not been included in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, they might have been dropped forever, but Ocoee established whitewater as a permanent feature of the summer Olympics. Every host city since 1996 has built a whitewater stadium powered entirely by electric pumps (which consume electricity at the rate of about three megawatts, one-tenth the net electricity cost of the Ocoee course).