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SHORE MAGAZINE

The 1970s! The Heyday Of Ski Shows At Lake Of The Ozarks

  • Updated
  • 4 min to read

In the 1970s and 1980s, you couldn't visit Lake of the Ozarks in the summer without going to see a ski show.

The concept which had drawn crowds in Florida's Cypress Gardens and the Wisconsin Dells also found firm footing at the Lake of the Ozarks. Here, two local water ski shows—the Lake Of The Ozarks Water Show and the Fort Of The Osage Ski Show—entertained countless thousands of visitors through the 1970s and 1980s.

Some of the same athletes from the Florida and Wisconsin shows also performed at Lake of the Ozarks. According to Todd Shockley, one member of the troupe who still lives at the Lake, several members of the local show traveled back and forth each year in order to earn money and ski in the other famous shows.

Ski Show Photo

Lake of the Ozarks Water Show 

The ski show phenomenon was made possible by advancements in boat engineering, and it fed vacationers' desire for their own ski boats, so they could learn and perform moves they were seeing in the shows. So while wake boats are all the rage on the Lake in 2024, forty years ago everyone wanted a ski boat.

Mark Ritchhart remembers the first time he tried waterskiing on Lake of the Ozarks. He was 14 years old, it was the mid-1970s, and he experienced what so many first-timers do: the frustration of not being able to get up on the skis.

“I could not get up, the entire day,” he said, recalling his frustration. “I was an athlete! I was a wrestler, a baseball player! And I couldn’t stand it, I hated it! I was frustrated that it beat me! I was cold! I’d never been in anything besides a pool. I was scared to death something was going to eat me. Everything was so big.”

So, he said, “I didn’t want to try it again.”

But two weeks later, his family traveled again from their home in Oscaloosa, Iowa to their new Lake house in Rocky Mount, Mo., and his parents convinced him to try again.

“I don’t know what hit me… I remember where we were, right outside of our cove there,” he recalled. “And I got up.”

He was instantly hooked.

For the next several summers, Mark attentively watched skiers at the Lake of the Ozarks’ two ski shows, then returning to the Lake house to try the tricks he’d seen. At 18 years old, he tried out for the ski show on the Bagnell Dam Strip. He was told, “You are barely making the show, but you are making it.”

Ritchhart 6.jpg

He did two shows a day that summer, and would ski backwards, on one ski, for eight miles, all the way home in the afternoons, just for extra training. Later he joined the Fort Of The Osage Ski Show, and kept improving.

He attended Northeast University (now Truman State University). Why? “Because it was in a direct straight line to Lake of the Ozarks... That Lake overall, it just meant so much to me,” Mark recalled.

He graduated from Northeast University in 1983 and headed to Florida, since it had no off-season for waterskiing. Soon, he had a job waterskiing at Sea World. By the late-1980s, he had switched to kneeboarding and was winning kneeboarding competitions. His success earned him a sponsorship by HO Sports and a rad photo on the cover of The Water Skier magazine.

Mark Ritchhart on the cover of The Water Skier Magazine

image used with permission from USA Water Ski & Wake Sports

Mark kneeboarded competitively until he was 50 years old. 

Ritchhart 23.jpg

His list of records and wins is almost too long to publish. Between 1987 and 2010, he had seven 1st Place Overall finishes at the AKA National Championship for kneeboarding. He set 10 kneeboarding records over 14 years, and won multiple international championships.

According to Wikipedia, water skiing was invented in 1922 by Ralph Samuelson. He reportedly used a pair of boards as skis and a clothesline as a towrope. Samuelson pioneered this first of watersports behind a boat going 20 mph, on Lake Pepin in Lake City, Minn. Since then, waterskiing may have taken a back seat to wake sports, but there are still plenty who love to ski. In 2017, a group from the Lake St. Louis Water Ski Club performed at the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout boat races.

Lake St. Louis Water Ski Club

The Lake St. Louis Water Ski Club performs at the 2017 Lake of the Ozarks Shootout boat races.

And just last summer, LakeExpo published a popular story and video of the Wintz family, who pulled 10 skiers behind their family's Cobalt R7.

courtesy of Holly Wintz

For many — whether skiers, kneeboarders, or wake-sporters, their love for watersports goes way back to the days of bright costumes, slapstick gags, and jaw-dropping acrobatics of Lake of the Ozarks' ski shows in the '70s and '80s.

"In our cove," Mark Ritchhart said, "I made my first kneeboard flip there in the Ozarks."

 

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