From Mondamin to Munich
/The Olympic Journey of John Burton
Young John Burton with his arm in a sling.
By the time John Burton was 11 years old, he had dislocated his left elbow six times and undergone three surgeries in an attempt to repair the problematic joint. He sustained the injury while playing football with a friend and, as a consequence, he shied away from contact sports while growing up.
John’s early medical misfortunes, however, turned out to be a bit of fortuitous fate that helped launch him on a course from the waters of Lake Summit in Tuxedo, NC to the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. At age 25, the boy with the bad elbow joined his USA teammates and marched into the spectacular Olympiastadion to the thunderous cheers of 77,000 spectators and a worldwide television audience of one billion people. John Gamble Burton was an Olympic athlete representing the United States in the sport of whitewater canoeing.
Fast forward 50 years. John is now 75 and recently moved to Flat Rock with his wife Jan to be close to their grandson in Charlotte. Tall, lanky, and still athletic, he readily acknowledges the many opportunities enjoyed while growing up and is disarmingly humble about a life full of extraordinary accomplishments. “I was really lucky,” he admits. “I had a wonderful upbringing, great family, and I was physically gifted. I had the silver spoon all my life.”
What John did with that silver spoon is what makes his story so special.
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John’s father, Bob Burton, as a counselor at Camp Mondamin ca 1930. Back row and 5th from right.
In some ways, John’s first steps toward that sunny day in Munich were actually taken by his father in the 1920s and 1930s in the mountains of western North Carolina. Long before John was born, his father Bob Burton was a camp counselor at Camp Mondamin on the shores of Lake Summit in Tuxedo. Bob Burton’s camp experience was so formative that years later he sent his own children - John and his brother and sister - to Mondamin and Camp Green Cove. John spent 10 consecutive summers at Mondamin in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
It was at Camp Mondamin that John developed his life-long passion for water sports. In those days, camp sessions lasted eight weeks and John spent his summer days swimming, playing tennis, sailing, and most influentially, paddling canoes on the mountain waters of Lake Summit. “Back then, Mondamin had a world-class summer camp paddling program,” John recalls. Presented with a new athletic outlet, John devoted himself to becoming a highly accomplished paddler. He started on the placid waters of Lake Summit, graduated to the swirling waters of the Lower Green River, and eventually, as his mastery of the sport continued to develop, to the wild white waters of the Nantahala River. John had found his sport.
John on the dock at camp.
When it came time to enter college in the fall of 1965, John was faced with a decision between attending either Duke or Dartmouth. There was a girl he liked at Duke. There was a well-known canoe club at Dartmouth and a proximity to challenging river runs. John chose Dartmouth and, although he had no way of knowing at the time, he was one giant step closer to the Olympics.
Shortly after his arrival at Dartmouth, John attended an activities night event designed to introduce students to all the extracurricular opportunities on campus. John went straight to the table with representatives of the famous Ledyard Canoe Club. Sitting at that table were Jay Evans and Wick Walker. Jay was the club coach and Wick was a star paddler for Dartmouth. The two of them had just returned from the 1965 Whitewater World Championships in Austria. A bond was quickly forged with the long-limbed freshman from Chicago and Wick eventually became John’s roommate. Jay, a Dartmouth alum, became John’s coach - both at Dartmouth and during the 1972 Olympic games. “Two of the strongest friendships of my life,” says John, nearly 60 years later.
While at Dartmouth, John competed in the C1 and C2 categories of whitewater canoeing - single man and two-man canoe competitions respectively. Competitors kneel in their canoes and use a single-blade paddle in contrast to kayakers who sit in their boats and use a double-bladed paddle. The equipment used in 1965 was much more rudimentary than the high-tech equipment used these days. John and his teammates built their own fiberglass boats, made their own paddles, and stitched together the spray skirts used to keep the boats from filling with water during the turbulence of white water competitions.
Wick Walker brought a boat back from the ’65 World Championships and together he and John used it to create a mold to build their own canoes. “It was endless hours of sanding and it had to be perfectly smooth. Wick didn’t want to do the work so he recruited this 18-year-old knucklehead.” John recalls with a laugh.
Paddling for the Ledyard Canoe Club during his four years in Hanover, John competed throughout New England and up and down the East coast. “We would just show up at competitions,” John remembers. “We drove endless hours to get to those races. We were a small but dedicated group of racers.” During this time, the United States also sent teams to the World Championships which were held in odd-numbered years.
There was a national ranking for US paddlers and teams were assembled from the top-ranked paddlers available to make the trip. “Available” meaning that the competitors had both the time and the money to make the trip. “Back then it was the A.T.P. squad - Ability To Pay,” John laughs. The team would fly to Europe on an Icelandic Air prop plane to Luxembourg. “We’d rent cars with boats stacked up on top driving all over the place. Every weekend we’d go to a different race venue. Those were fabulous times.”
John graduated from Dartmouth in ’69 and went on to get an MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1971. From there he moved to Philadelphia and took a job as a security analyst in a Trust Department. But he never strayed far from his canoe and continued to train and compete at the highest levels of competition. John was ranked among the top 3-4 US paddlers in C1 and competed in the World Championships in ’67, ’69, and ’71.
John’s official USA Olympic team photo. 1972.
In May of 1972, the USA Olympic Trials for white water canoeing were held on the aptly named Savage River in Maryland. John and his teammates were there with big dreams of making the team - and facing pressure like they had never known. “The Olympic Trials are way more pressure than actually competing in the Olympics,” says John. “As somebody once said, ‘You can lose the Olympics with honor’ but you’ve got to get there first!”
John’s years of experience at Camp Mondamin and Dartmouth served him well and he qualified for the Olympic team in both the C1 and C2 competitions. Team rules, however, allowed that he could only compete in one of the events. He chose to team up with his close friend Tom Southworth in a C2 boat and relinquished his C1 spot to his college teammate, Wick. Good friends and fierce competitors, the trio were now part of the USA’s 13-man paddling team. Having survived the intense pressure of the trials, it was on to Munich where celebration - and tragedy - awaited.
Traveling to the Olympics was a family affair for the Burton clan. All told, 15 members of John’s family made the trip to Germany - including his father Bob whose own days of paddling on Lake Summit had been a precursor to John’s Olympic journey. The Olympic venue for the whitewater competition was in Augsburg about 30 miles west of Munich. John and his teammates stayed at the Olympic Village in Munich and would commute via train each day to the man-made river course in Augsburg - initially to train and then ultimately to race in the medal competition.
Munich Olympic Stadium during the Opening Ceremonies. August 26th, 1972.
Prior to that, however, John and his teammates participated in the pomp and grandeur of the opening ceremonies at the Olympic Stadium. John vividly recalls the moment when his long Olympic journey culminated. “You are in this tunnel waiting your turn and when you emerge you are greeted by 80,000 cheering people. It was amazing. I was walking along and waving - as if they were cheering for me.” John Burton was 25 years old and at the peak of his paddling career.
The actual competition took place a few days after the Opening Ceremonies. Because it was a man-made venue, there was plenty of seating for spectators, and for the first time in his life, John competed in front of a large crowd “There were 30,000 people on the course. We’d never had 30 people watch us who weren’t related to us.”
The Augsburg course was essentially a concrete canal with vertical sides that created boiling eddies not frequently seen on natural rivers. John and Tom thought they would need a bigger and deeper boat to handle the unusual currents, but in retrospect that turned out to be a miscalculation. Lighter and thinner boats proved to be more maneuverable and faster. During their counting run (the best time out of two runs), the Americans actually executed two “Eskimo Rolls” where the boat and paddlers do a 360-degree rotation in the roiling waters of the river. Not an easy feat in a two-man canoe.
Tom Southworth and John Burton (right) competing in the 1972 Olympics.
When the competition was done and times calculated, John and Tom finished 12th out of 24 teams and were the best American boat in the competition. There would be no podium finish for the young paddlers, but that fact does not diminish John’s memories of the day. “It was just an incredible experience. We were not delusional that we were going to win a medal. We were just happy to be there.”
NY Times article about John Burton and his teammates at the Munich Olympics. August 31, 1972. (Click here to read article.)
John and his teammates were even featured in the NY Times in an article entitled, “The Hasty Search for a Watery Grave,” written by the legendary sports columnist, Red Smith. The Munich games also featured Olga Korbut, the petite Soviet gymnast who was the darling of the games. Mark Spitz was on his way to winning an unparalleled seven gold medals. And the world celebrated the communion of nearly 10,000 athletes from 121 nations. That celebration came to a tragic halt, however, on September 5th with the terrorist attack that targeted members of the Israeli team. As the world watched in horror, all the hostages and their captors were killed in a shootout late at night at the Munich Airport.
John was in the Olympic Village during the hostage standoff. “I have a memory of looking around a building and over some trees and there was one of the hooded dudes sticking his face out of the building where they were holding hostages.” This was the era before cell phones and internet connections so John and his teammates were actually less aware of the full magnitude of the attack as it was happening. “The people who were at home watching Jim McKay on ABC Sports had a much hairier few of it than we did.”
Following his Olympic experience, John returned to the bank in Philadelphia and continued to combine a career in finance with his passion for paddling. Then in 1975, he faced another cross-roads decision when he was interviewed for jobs at two organizations arguably on the extreme opposites of the employment spectrum. One interview was with Goldman Sachs to be an investment banker. The second interview was with the nascent Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC) back in the mountains of western North Carolina. Goldman Sachs never had a chance. For the first time in his life, John was offered “a minuscule amount of money” to be involved in the sport he loved. Again, his timing was perfect and John joined NOC as whitewater sports prepared to experience phenomenal growth in national popularity.
Eventually, 7 of the 13 members of the 1972 USA Olympic Whitewater team ended up working with John at NOC. John spent the next 16 years serving as President of NOC and then operated the Nantahala Village resort for 15 years until 2005. He served another stint as CFO and VP of the Nantahala Outdoor Center from 2008 until 2014. The move to NOC helped revitalize John’s paddling career and he subsequently competed in two more World Championships in 1977 and 1979.
John Burton is a member of the Southern Appalachian Whitewater Hall of Fame.
Again, he credits good fortune for his successful stint with NOC. “For the longest time I told the story that I’m basically capable of doing one job on the planet and that was running the NOC. I’ve since reframed that and I know I can do a lot more stuff. My skills, my experience, and my education all contributed to the success of NOC. I made a difference.”
Looking back on his Olympic experience - and his life in general - John is humble about his accomplishments, crediting much of his success to the fact that “the stars aligned beautifully.” Indeed, whitewater racing would not return as an Olympic competition for another 20 years after Munich due to the cost, logistics, and lack of interest by the host nations during those intervening years.
In recognition of his many accomplishments and contributions to the sport, John has been inducted into the Southern Appalachian Whitewater Hall of Fame. Despite all the accolades, he’s not one to boast about his past. “I don’t talk about it much, but I love it when people ask about it,” he admits. “Being able to say you were an Olympian is way better than saying you missed the team by one spot at the Olympic trials.”
John Burton today.
Last summer John worked with the staff at Camp Pinnacle and this summer he will be working with the staff at Camp Falling Creek in Tuxedo. His official title will be “Greybeard” and he looks forward to training staff and helping them realize the importance - and impact - of their work with campers. “This is an incredibly important job. Being a camp counselor and having an impact on kids is highly valuable. It’s difficult work, and yet it is incredibly rewarding.”
After a lifetime of accomplishment and success, John Burton has returned to Henderson County. And he sees that as only fitting. “Camp Mondamin, the outdoor world, and the paddling world have been the most influential factors in my life. There were a half-dozen mentors during my formative camp years and now I get to be a mentor to a new generation of campers right here back where it all started. Life has gone full-circle in that way.”
Indeed it has. And a new generation of campers will be the beneficiaries of that long circuitous route that brought John Burton back to Flat Rock.
