Awarded to Winner of the Most Individual Points in Para Events
Deborah Smith Page has been involved in canoesport for over 60 years, beginning her career racing on the Potomac River with the Washington Canoe Club. She raced in Germany as a teen in the mid 1960’s with US Olympic Medalist Glorianne Perrieri in the K-2 500m. After racing competitively over several decades, extended all the way to 2002, she transitioned to coaching. Upon her retirement as a colonel from the Air Force, she moved to Melbourne, Fla. to enjoy 12 months of good paddling weather and continued to support canoe/kayak. One of the ways she supported paddlers in retirement was to open her house up to athletes needing a place to stay during winter and spring training camps. Over the decades, Deb has hosted hundreds and hundreds of paddlers, giving them free rooms and often cooking for them, too. In the world of elite US paddlers, she became known to the paddlers fondly as “Mama Deb”.
In the late 2000’s the International Canoe Federation began to seriously look for ways to make canoesport accessible to handicapped athletes. They generated criteria for disability levels and opened up both World Cup races and World Championship races to para-canoe and para-kayak athletes. While the US had para-athletes ready to race, what the emerging sport lacked in the US was a competent, knowledgeable, volunteer who could manage and train them. Deb Page became this missing piece and nearly singlehandedly launched the US Para paddling program. Deb became all things Para in the US. She wrote US Team selection criteria, recruited para athletes, found and outfitted boats, and got those boats to athletes in need, often in far flung US cities. Deb organized training camps all over the US and often hosted athletes at her house in Melbourne for extended training camps. In the summer she was the Team US Leader, Official, Coach and Manager for ParaCanoe, traveling both domestically and internationally to races all over the world. ParaCanoe was finally added as an Olympic Sport leading into 2016 Brazil. Deb was the natural fit to become the first ever ParaCanoe team leader and head coach. She led the team to Rio for a successful first foray into the new world of Olympic Para Canoe. Five years later she was in Tokyo in 2021 for the COVID-delayed Olympics and witnessed the first ParaCanoe US Medalist when Blake Haxton made the podium. After Tokyo, she finally began to step back from the day-to-day grind of being all things Para for Team USA. However, still today, Debbie is one of the few Para-leaders in the US able to classify athletes both nationally and internationally.
This beautiful trophy in her honor was designed, commissioned and presented to the inaugural Para winner by Ian Ross. Crowd-funding was used to generate income for expenses involved in its construction, with many of the former athletes donating who have called her “Mama Deb”.
| YEAR | AWARDED TO |
|---|---|
| 2025 | Brenden Duncan |