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REOPENED 1984 · OLYMPIC TRIALS, APRIL 2004
The course: Downtown South Bend runs a whitewater course through its old mill race. The East Race — the channel dug in the 1840s to power the city's industry, filled and forgotten after its working life — was dug out and rebuilt from August 1982, and in 1984 the city reopened it as an engineered whitewater course through downtown, a drop of about twelve feet in a run the sources state at 1,900 feet (the visitor bureau and the city) or 1,500 and more (the paddling record), never reconciled and printed both ways in the home sections. The visitor bureau calls the East Race "the first man-made whitewater course in North America" — printed here as the bureau's claim. The fame's hard evidence is competitive: in April 2004 the United States Olympic Team Trials in whitewater slalom were held on the East Race, on the water that once turned the Oliver plow works' wheels.
Sources:
- The Famous Locations section of this history — the East Race's 1984 reopening, the twelve-foot drop, the two course lengths as the sources state them, the visitor bureau's "first man-made whitewater course in North America," and the April 2004 U.S. Olympic Team Trials; the Government section — the race filled and forgotten, dug out and rebuilt from August 1982.