HOMESTAKE — A tie?

The best kayakers in the world battle Class V waters on Homestake Creek over two runs with wicked jumps and crushing rocks with a combined two-run distance of about a half-mile during the course of 31⁄2 minutes, and there's a tie down to a hundredth of a second?

The Czech Republic's Honza Lasko and New Zealand's Michael Dawson managed to do just that, both finishing with a time of 3 minutes, 34.62 seconds, sharing the top step of the men's podium in Thursday's steep-creek championship, the first event of the 2011 Teva Mountain Games.

Adriene Levknecht, of Asheville, N.C., won the women's competition handily, 17 seconds ahead of New Zealand's Nikki Kelly.

“No. 1-and-a-half,” joked Dawson about his win total at the Teva Mountain Games — he won this competition in 2009. “I think that this is the first kayak race I've ever been in where there's been a tie. With the precision timing they have, it's pretty amazing. Me and Honza are on the same wavelength.”

This is the first tie in a Teva Mountain Games event. And it's funny that Dawson brought up the timing equipment. It's the same sort of technology that the Vail Valley Foundation employs for World Cup ski racing, and in the 1999 World Alpine Ski Championships at Birds of Prey in Beaver Creek, Austria's Hermann Maier and Norway's Lasse Kjus ended up tied in super-G, down to the hundredth, splitting the gold.

Lasko charges

Dawson had a cushion going into the finals. He staked himself to nearly a 3-second lead over Lasko with a run of 1:45.41. The top 22 men qualified for the finals with Dawson getting to go last.

“I had a good lead in the first run,” Dawson said. “I had the best first run I could have had. In the second run, I just knew I had to hold on. I didn't hear what Honza did (when I was) at the top. I'm guessing he had a really good second run, so that's cool. It's good to share the podium with him because we've known each other for a long time.”

Lasko made his charge with a brilliant second trip down Homestake, topping all competitors in that final run with a 1:46.49.

“The second run was so sweet,” Lasko said. “I had a good first run, but I made some small mistakes. But the second run was moving so fast, super-smooth.”

Dawson struggled a little bit in his final run. He said that he felt the water had risen a bit and that his straighter line took him into some rocks which cost him some time.

“Come on, it's Homestake,” he said. “You never know what you're going to get.”

There was some confusion at the finish, as to whether there would be some form of tiebreaker. Lasko nixed that quickly.

“I am from the Czech Republic and we have low altitude,” he said. “In Colorado, we have high altitude. So half way (down the course), I can't breath anymore.”

Stopping kayaking

Levknecht had no such drama, yet her win was significant. With the convincing victory, she becomes the first female not named Tanya Faux or Nikky Kelly to win the steep creek since the event's inception in 2003, when Shannon Carroll took top honors.

Kelly had won four-straight titles from 2004-07 and Faux and Kelly had traded the crown back-and-forth the last three years.

Levknecht finished fourth here last year, and the key to her victory, she said, is somewhat counter-intuitive.

“I've actually stopped kayaking,” Levknecht said. “I definitely do not kayak as much as I used to. I'm back in college full-time. I don't really have the time. I've been mountain biking a bunch and I really, really feel like mountain biking gives you a full-body workout.”

Enrolled at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, she made it work. Levknecht led Kelly by 8 seconds after the first run and added another 9 seconds to that advantage in the second.

“I was feeling good for sure and then I started feeling better and better, hearing that the girls were crashing out a little bit,” she said. “I knew at that point I needed to keep it clean and keep it hairy-side up. Down-stream motion is a good thing in a race.”

Sports Editor Chris Freud can be reached at 970-748-2934 or cfreud@vaildaily.com.