An Ode to Karol Osusky

“Nationals duz not know a ubermensch iz comen!” Karol, my Slovakian kayak coach, bellowed as I approached the dock paddling an eighteen-inch rocket boat.

My delight at staying upright, avoiding Karol’s now familiar refrain that “Kayak is not submarine!” spread across my face in a wide grin.

I was sixteen years old and had been training in sprint kayaking for exactly six weeks, earning a spot at US nationals by sheer chance. Thanks to Karol’s influence, I had been able to join the club hosting the event that year and so was given a spot gratis. It was Karol’s home club, and he had enough sway to get me in immediately to gain access to coaches and training partners.

Until now, a week before nationals, I had never successfully paddled one of the fast but unstable fiberglass racing boats, so Karol had secured a plastic boat with a three-foot hull, “the tub” in his parlance, the equivalent to training for NASCAR in a minivan.

My sophomore year, I signed up for the kayak leg of a ten-event relay race my Boy Scout troop was competing in called “ski-to-sea.” I had joined Cub Scouts at age six alongside my brothers and fallen in love. By the time I’d graduated to Boy Scouts, each summer our home had turned into a resupply camp for high-adventure trips; we would return from a ten-day kayak trip only to pack up for a weeklong backpacking trek.

Karol was a Slovakian immigrant who attended the church that hosted our troop meetings, an eccentric sixty-something Soviet dissident who projected a wild love for his adopted country onto me. He was five-foot-eight with a healthy looking belly and the largest “outie” belly button I’d ever seen. It looked like a thumb, and he would point at it and joke that he used it to pleasure women. He had a wide, ruddy face with a big nose and narrow eyes framed by white, neatly trimmed hair. He would turn on Estelle’s “American Boy” as we drove to practice and shout “Urv meh Ahmaricahn boi!” while gruffly smacking me on the shoulder.

Our relationship blossomed in the three-month, Karate Kid-style training regimen he’d crafted as a retired professional kayaker. In between devastating workouts, he would check my stool to make sure I was eating properly.

“Yur pop look lick mush! Et more banana!”

Our training consisted of intervals where Karol would point with his paddle at a bridge, buoy, or weeping willow. “We race until finish line,” he would say, nodding gravely before counting down to three.

The race would start with a torrent of grunts and slaps of the paddles catching the water. After a few moments, Karol would pull ahead, blasting my boat with his wake.

But as I climbed toward life’s physical peak, Karol descended. A month into our training, his face gleamed with sweat and his breath quickened in time with my rising pace. One day, while charging toward a willow, my body’s parts, once awkwardly independent, moved as one. As the nose of my boat punched ahead of his for the first time, I heard a “Hooray!” rise up behind me. I glanced behind me to catch the pride gleaming in his eyes before my body screamed for air and I doubled over, gasping.

Karol was born in the midst of a bloody theater of war featuring the Red Army and the Nazis. The trauma of the conflict had caused Karol’s mother to dry up.

“I seckled frum eh got.”

“From a goat?” I clarified.

“A got! Fer tree months I nursed frum gots tit!”

He ultimately escaped the Soviets in the early eighties by swimming across the Danube to Austria while bullets tore up the water around him. Needless to say, his psyche was deeply scarred even as his body escaped harm.

“Gypies ar scum,” he declared, “but Ressians er evn verse.”

In the dark pall of the Soviet bloc, Karol found his way on the water. Kayaking was his light, his literature, his music, and his freedom. At their best, sprint kayakers look like dancers—rhythmically flipping their hips to transfer the power from their twisting torsos into the blade. Each stroke is punctuated with a pause, “the catch,” to glide swan-like through the water. While kayaking, Karol was as free as the fish and the birds—emancipated from politics, oppression, surveillance, and the totalitarianism that weighed him down on land.

On the water, he laughed and glided and pulsed his body in tune with the wind and the waves. He wove himself into the thread of nature that evaporated human derangements like dew in the morning sun. Coming to America gave Karol the feeling of kayaking all the time. It made sense he would want to share with me what probably felt to him like the most American of sports.

After nationals, Karol reached out to his contacts in Slovakia and secured me a spot at the Olympic training center in Trenčín. I would miss a semester of high school, which was all the convincing I needed. The experience included the dorm master calling me a “filthy American” and waking me up at 5 a.m. by dumping a bucket of water on me while demanding—in Slovak—that I clean my room. I was the first American to attend the local school, and my grades defaulted to all “As” since I couldn’t understand anything going on in class.

After training for six months abroad, I came back to win a silver medal at the national championships, which is not as impressive as it sounds. Winning a medal in sprint kayaking in the US is like winning a regional bowling tournament. There are only a few hundred teenagers nationally who train regularly. But Karol separated me from the teeming hordes of middle-class college applicants. By helping to get me into Stanford, he passed along his American dream to me.

Karol died in 2019 after suffering a stroke; may he rest in peace.