She goes racing at speeds of 70 kilometres per hour along the waters of the Moselle River in Europe – barefooted. At top speed she’ll nonchalantly lift a leg and do a pirouette. At 45, Stefanie Kirsch is one of the global best in the world’s strangest aqua sport: Barefoot Water Skiing. It’s so obscure that you can count serious women barefoot skiers on the fingers of one hand. And two of them are related. Kirsch, a doctor of orthopaedic medicine, has been water-skiing shoeless - also simply called ‘barefooting’ - for nearly 30 years. It’s not her feet that tingle when Kirsch skims the surface of the Moselle, but rather her nerves. “Speed is the real kick,” she says while taking a break in her training at the river town of Schleich. ”Of course you do have to watch out that you don’t fall. At high speed, water is as hard as concrete,” she adds. She has so far avoided serious injury – picking up just a few bruises. “You can learn how to fall. If you can do a roll, like in judo, it’s not so bad,” she says. Kirsch trains three times a week on the Moselle, a Franco-German river that is lined with beautiful vineyards and exquisite olde-worlde castles - but she keeps her eyes on the water. With her husband Franz Kirsch piloting the motorboat, she skis behind it, clinging to a 23-metre-long towrope. Often her daughter Jacky, 14, also trains with her. At the World Championships in Mulwala, Australia, Jacky was placed fourth place among
the juniors in the ‘tricks’ category. ”I love the speed,” says Jacky, who is the youngest girl from Germany to compete internationally.
Mum has captured four world championship titles, most recently in Australia, in the discipline of jumping. She also has 14 first-place finishes in the European championships. And German titles? ”I’ve lost count of them,” says Stefanie.
Stefan Woerpel, the expert at ‘barefooting’ at the German Water Skiing and Wakeboard Federation, says that there are about a hundred barefoot skiers in Germany. ”Barefooting is a niche sport here,” he says. One of the main reasons is that it requires special conditions - quiet, smooth water and no boat traffic. You also have to be affluent - to own a motorboat, and have someone willing to be a constant driver. The conditions on the stretch of the Moselle near Schleich are ideal.
Not far from a sluice the water backs up toward a large island. However, if a ’wakeboarder’ has just passed through, creating waves, the ‘barefooters’ must first wait for the waters to calm down again. Kirsch can’t train out on the river in winter - it nearly freezes over; so she goes for special strengthening and fitness training to a gym. Sometimes she flies to warmer places, such as Florida, to train. Woerpel calls the 45-year-old a world class Barefoot Skier. ”It is especially remarkable that she has managed to maintain a high level for such a long period,” he says. Kirsch won her first world title in 1988, in the jump competition - which is considered the most difficult discipline. Water skiing and trendy wakeboarding are expanding rapidly in Germany, Woerpel adds. The number of cable skiing facilities on German waters has grown to around 60. “On good weather days there are about 150,000 people out water skiing,” he says.
We ask Doctor Kirsch whether she has callouses on the soles of her feet with all her barefooting. ”No, I have totally normal feet,” she replies with a smile. However, she does feel a kind of muscle soreness in her soles at the start of a new season. “The barefoot skiers have a ‘jokey’ name for this phenomenon: “we call it ‘sock burn’,” she says.
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