April 25, 2026
Lake Eloise, Winter Haven: Where Performance Water Skiing Began
Dick Pope turned Lake Eloise into the most photographed lake in America
During World War II, a newspaper published a photograph of skiers at Cypress Gardens, and soldiers stationed in the area turned up expecting a water show. There was no water show. Julie Pope gathered her children and their friends and sent them out on Lake Eloise to put one on. Visit Central Florida tells the story that way. The improvised show did not stay improvised; the skiing became part of what the attraction did every day.
Cypress Gardens had opened on the Lake Eloise shoreline in 1936, founded by Dick and Julie Pope, and it opened as a botanical garden. Cypress trees, canals, flower beds, and Southern Belles in hoop skirts gave photographers something Florida could sell, and Dick Pope was known for knowing what to do with a photograph. Skiing was not part of the original attraction. What people tend to remember about Cypress Gardens is the Belles, Pope's publicity, or its billing as Florida's first theme park, all of it decades ahead of the parks that came later.
Water skiing itself was not invented on Lake Eloise. Performance water skiing was: the theatrical kind, with timing and costumes and stunts. Florida Memory dates that to Cypress Gardens in 1941, and the title the place carried afterward, Water Ski Capital of the World, was earned on the water rather than in the gardens.
The lake is what made a daily show practical. Lake Eloise put a broad, open sheet of water directly at the edge of the attraction, wide enough for a towboat to build speed and close enough that visitors watched a run from start to finish without going looking for it. An act that carried real physical risk could be rehearsed and repeated on a schedule, because the water in front of the gardens was calm often enough to allow it. Human pyramids rose behind the towboats. Skiers crossed the surface barefoot. The same routine ran in front of tourists, photographers, soldiers, and Winter Haven families who grew up thinking it ordinary to watch people build a pyramid while a boat pulled them along.
The cameras came for it. Movie crews and newsreel crews filmed at the gardens, celebrities came to be photographed there, and Esther Williams pictures carried the Cypress Gardens look far past Polk County. LEGOLAND Florida's history of the old gardens counts more than 50 films and television shows, and credits the water-ski shows with helping make the place a world-renowned destination. The lake is in a great many of those frames, because the act the cameras came for happened on it.
Cypress Gardens changed hands. After Walt Disney World opened, Central Florida's tourism business shifted toward the new parks, and the old attraction eventually closed. LEGOLAND Florida opened on the former Cypress Gardens property in 2011 and preserved the historic botanical gardens inside the new park. Skiing on Lake Eloise outlasted the attraction that invented it: the shows kept running in a new form, with LEGO pirates in place of the old Cypress Gardens cast, until WLRN reported that LEGOLAND planned to end its water-ski shows and competitions in 2025.
Eighty-nine years after Dick and Julie Pope opened their garden on this shoreline, the beds, the canals, and the cypress they planted are still inside the park on Lake Eloise.
Presented by
Own waterfront in Winter Haven?
Lake history is interesting. Shoreline conditions are practical. Horizon Marine builds docks, seawalls, and shoreline protection on Winter Haven's lakes — and gives a straight answer on what your property actually needs.
Lake Marion, Haines City: The Island House Built in the Shape of a Celtic Cross
In 1887 an Irish carpenter who had come south for his lungs started cutting cypress on a 23-acre island in Lake Marion, and built a house in the shape of a Celtic cross — his family has held the island ever since
Read →
Lake Osceola, Winter Park: The Boat Tour That Outlasted Everything Else in Orlando
The narrow canals between Winter Park's lakes were dug for Gilded Age homeowners — and in 1938 they became the route for an attraction that has run longer than anything else in greater Orlando
Read →
Lake Bonny, Lakeland: The Nine Inches That Kept the Pumps Off
When Hurricane Milton pushed Lake Bonny into east Lakeland's neighborhoods in October 2024, the city couldn't legally start pumping until the water had already reached people's homes
Read →
Lake John, Lakeland: The Lake a Dragline Left Behind
The 99-acre lake behind the ballfields at Curtis Peterson Park in Lakeland wasn't shaped by any river — it's water sitting in ground a phosphate dragline emptied out in the 1950s
Read →
Building on Lake Eloise or another Winter Haven lake?
Free waterfront assessment · License #SCC131154313