RECESS: Surviving a Zambezi Hippo Attack - Juliet Starrett's Extreme Whitewater World Championship Story
About this episode
Juliet Starrett shares her incredible story of surviving a hippo attack during a whitewater championship on the Zambezi River.
Juliet and I have told pieces of this story over the years, but we've never sat down and told the whole thing from the beginning. This episode, I'm turning the tables and interviewing Juliet, because the full arc of how she ended up getting launched twelve feet into the air by a hippo on the Zambezi River is too good to tell any other way. It starts in the late 1990s, when Juliet was a D1 rower turned wilderness river guide in California: fit, competent on Class IV water, and completely unaware that a tryout on the Kern River was about to drop her onto one of the most storied women's extreme whitewater teams in the world. We're talking Kelly Califadich, Julie Munger, Beth Rippins, Sue Norman, Brooke Winger, Rebecca Rusch: true legends of the sport. Juliet was the youngest, the least experienced, and by Rebecca's nickname for her, the MEAT in the middle of the boat. What she had was athletic horsepower, the right mindset, and no real concept yet of what she'd signed up for. Winning nationals meant an all-expenses-paid trip to the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe for the 1997 World Championships. Two weeks of daily training in the Batoka Gorge: daily flips in Class V rapids, giardia…
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