(Main Photo: Fred Honebein in stroke – second from left – sets the rhythm for the boat. Courtesy of Annie Kakela.)

Steamboat Springs, CO - As Paris says bienvenue to the world during the 2024 Olympic Games this summer, Steamboat Springs’ summer Olympians, small in number compared to their skiing counterparts, step into the limelight back home. 

Rowing was not always a way of life for Annie Kakela and Fred Honebein. The husband-and-wife duo started rowing – before they knew each other – to see where it could take them. It took them to the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, Georgia. 


FRED HONEBEIN 
Fred started rowing when he was in high school in San Francisco as a means of staying in shape for basketball – which, he points out, is how many rowers get started: trying to stay in shape for a different sport. Post-college, when the recession hit in 1992, Fred packed up his truck and headed to Philadelphia to row for the Pennsylvania Athletic Club. “My approach was to see where it takes me,” he says.

He made the U.S. National Team in 1993 and won a bronze medal with his team. But he wondered: had it been luck? When he made the team the following year and won the World Championships, he kept going. “Some people train for the Olympics,” he says, “but I was just training to make the team and eventually that led to making the 1996 Olympic team.”

The hype around having the Olympics in the United States was thunderous, Fred remembers. “The Olympics is a different animal in that there’s more pressure because it’s every four years,” he says. “Also, all of your friends and family are there. That, coupled with going from a pretty anonymous athlete to getting the star treatment, is a lot.” At the time, Fred’s rowing team appeared in Time Magazine and USA Today, and renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz did a photoshoot of his boat. “I don’t believe we handled the attention particularly well,” Fred says.

At the opening ceremonies, Muhammed Ali lit the Olympic torch. Fred and Annie watched – in a stadium next door to the actual stadium, the Centennial Olympic Stadium – as each nation paraded through. “When the U.S. came in, the whole stadium just erupted,” Fred remembers. “The whole field was packed. You could barely move.”

The rowers competed during the first week of the Olympics on Lake Lanier, a reservoir about 50 miles outside of Atlanta. Fred’s boat had medaled for the past three years, winning bronze in the 1993 World Championships, gold in the 1994 World Championships and another bronze at the 1995 World Championships, among other competitions. Fred was named Rowing Athlete of the Year in 1995. In the Olympics, his boat placed fifth. “Physically we were the strongest team out there, but mentally we just imploded,” he says, which he attributes to the pressure and attention.

Fred decided not to train again, instead beginning a coaching career at the collegiate level. “I think one of the things that we really got out of our athletic experience is the people that we trained with and competed with – they’re still some of our closest friends,” Fred says. “When you’re in a sport, training like that, you know these people almost better than your own family. You’re with them day in and day out, for the highs and the lows and the incredibly stressful situations. The medal was a thing that we missed out on but the friendships that we have last longer than the medal.”


ANNIE KAKELA 
Annie, a Steamboat Springs native who grew up participating in Winter Sports Club and horseback riding, began rowing at Dartmouth College. “I didn’t know anything about it but I wanted to try something totally new rather than another fall of dryland,” she says. When she was told that she could likely make a racing boat in the spring if she skipped skiing and trained for rowing during the winter, she decided to give it a shot. Once she graduated, she gave herself a year, in 1992, to try and make the U.S. National Team, which she did.

Finding similar success as Fred’s on the national level, she made the Olympic team several years later. “I definitely had a dream of going to the Olympics,” Annie says. “I just didn’t know what path might get me there.”

In 1993, she won a silver medal at the World Championships in both the 8+ and the 4-. She returned to Steamboat, worked with ski patrol, and pondered whether or not to continue. Eventually, she did continue with rowing, earning more silver medals in 1994 and a gold medal the following year. Her team also won several other international regattas including the European Championships in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1994 and 1996. “Every year you have to win your seat in the boat,” Annie says. “Like Fred, I took it one year at a time, knowing that it took skill, strength and a bit of luck to make an Olympic team.”

“I got everything from that – memories and friendships and lessons learned. It was grueling with lots of sacrifices, but also with many successes along the way,” Annie says.

At the Olympics, Annie’s team finished fourth. “It was extremely disappointing, but to me, it was the journey to get to the Olympics that I really appreciated,” she says. “I got everything from that – memories and friendships and lessons learned. It was grueling with lots of sacrifices, but also with many successes along the way.”

Many of Annie’s teammates continued to train after the 1996 Olympics but Annie, who was basing her experience not on her Olympic performance but on the journey as a whole, decided to start a career. She went back to school and earned her master’s degree in telecommunications. “I wanted to have a very corporate job and excel in business,” she says. “That lasted for about six years and I hated it.” Annie too, turned to coaching.

To this day, Annie credits the experiences she had growing up – on Howelsen Hill with the Winter Sports Club, horseback riding, hiking and going on trips with Steamboat Mountain School – for her ability to succeed in rowing. “Balance and rhythm were specific skills that I learned, but also just toughness,” she says. Annie and Fred’s son, Beck, played hockey and football growing up in Steamboat; now, he’s a sophomore at Syracuse University rowing in the varsity boat. “He absolutely got a lot of those skills from sports in Steamboat,” Annie says.

With the summer Olympics constantly adding new sports to their roster – this year breakdancing and kayak cross were new – Annie and her family wanted to raise awareness for summer sports.

They founded the Steamboat Springs Summer Sports Club, which will recognize not only Olympians, but also high-level athletes who compete in summer sports, especially helping young athletes to achieve their goals. “It’s great to be remembered in your hometown,” Annie says. “It’s priceless to have your hometown’s support as you aspire to your goals.”

Blake swam in the summer club for several years but, as children in Steamboat Springs often do, he played several other sports, like hockey and baseball. In high school, he says he had “delusions of grandeur” about his swimming abilities; but when he started training harder and more often with friends during his junior year, his thoughts weren’t so delusional anymore.

“I watched the 2004 Olympics, which were the year before I went to college,” Blake says. “I knew I wanted to go. I told my mom and made a plan…half that I followed and half that I didn’t.”

Patti created practices for Blake. “It was admirable to watch him because swimming in Steamboat, especially in the winter, is not for the faint of heart,” Patti says. “I tried to make the workouts as short as I could but as efficient as I could. He was in and out of the pool in an hour. He was very dedicated and determined to do it.”

As Blake continued to drop time, he sent letters to every college he could think of, asking for a walk-on spot on their swim team. “At this point, I was actually still not a very good swimmer,” he notes, “but I had shown a ton of improvement.”

The following year, he started as a freshman at the University of Denver and a swim team walk-on. “I was the slowest kid on the team when I started,” Blake says. “But I was committed to working as hard as I could.”

In his sophomore year, he started making significant progress. He broke school records, attended the NCAA Championships, and kept improving. By the time he graduated, he was the best swimmer on the team and he turned his focus to the upcoming 2012 Olympics in London.

“They made me believe that I could do something like this,” Blake says.

“Swimming for the U.S. is the hardest team to make,” Blake says. But he had a card up his sleeve: Blake was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was able to try out for Canada’s team. “I would have loved to swim for the U.S.,” he says. “Basically that’s a guaranteed gold medal. But making that team was going to be a long shot.”

Instead, he qualified for Canada’s team, moved to Victoria, British Columbia, and trained – hard. “There were a lot of ups and downs,” he says. “By the time the Olympics rolled around and I had made it onto the team, I was just so grateful to be there.”

Blake credits his family as his biggest supporters along the way. “They made me believe that I could do something like this,” he says. Patti gave Blake a rock with the word ‘Believe’ written on it at the start of the Olympics, and he carried it with him in his pocket. “I took it out when I was going out to race and I dropped it, and it shattered all over the floor,” he remembers – humorously now. In the end, the rock didn’t matter; Blake’s family and friends believed in him. In London, he competed in the 200 meter freestyle and came in 17th place.

“I knew I was at the end of my career,” he says. “So I just took it all in and really enjoyed it. It was the culmination of a lifetime of work to get there, and ultimately, it’s the journey that matters. That was in my mind the whole time I was there.”


For others, its absence was fitting. A big empty hole has existed in the heart of the Steamboat Springs’ kayaking community since Rich’s death in a kayaking accident in 1997.

“Rich was the icon of the Steamboat paddling scene, a two-time Olympian who trained right at his namesake park on the Yampa,” says Eugene Buchanan of Paddling Life. “He had that perfect combination of strength and skill, which is what you need at the elite international level. For some reason the Yampa River helped sow those seeds. Steamboat is known for so many skiing Olympians that it was great to have a kayaker on that list.”

Becoming an Olympic kayaker in Steamboat is no easy feat. Sometimes, Rich and his coach, Tom Steitz, would take a sledgehammer and an axe to ice on the Yampa River so they could train in winter.

A silver medalist at the 1993 Canoe Slalom World Championships and a top-ranked U.S. kayaker, Rich competed in the slalom kayaking events in two Olympics: the ’92 Games in Barcelona and the ’96 Atlanta Games. He finished sixth in Barcelona, hampered by a five-second penalty for touching a gate. An eerily similar situation cost him a medal at the ’96 Games, where a judge mistakenly penalized Rich for touching the slalom gate. The call was subsequently disproven by a too-late review of the video. By all accounts, Rich just shrugged off the incident, disappointed by the results but knowing he had completed an award-winning run.

With moist eyes, his mother, Edith, recalls Rich’s good nature. “He was always happy,” she says. “Such a happy child.”

In addition to being an Olympic athlete, Rich excelled in environmental science. He earned his undergraduate degree in geological engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, his master’s degree in hydrogeology at Penn State, and his doctorate in geological sciences at the University of British Columbia.

Rich died in 1997 while attempting to run Big Brother, a class-V stretch of the White Salmon River in Washington state. Things went awry from the beginning of his descent; his kayak veered slightly right and got caught in an eddy near an underwater cave. When it finally emerged, he was not with it. His wife, Rosi, who was waiting for him downstream, was pregnant with their first child at the time. Their son, River, was born six months after Rich’s death.

A statue of Rich stands guard at the edge of the Yampa River on Third Street and Lincoln Avenue. “He was as well-known, liked and respected in the international competition arena as he was at home,” Eugene says.