1:00PM Sunday Oct 01,
2006 New Zealand Herald
By Leah Haines
It's only a few hundred metres across the placid, silver water in front of Bruce Kendall's Buckland's Beach home to Brown's Island in the gateway to the Tamaki Estuary. On a day like this, where the cockles crack under bare feet and the sun plays with the rock pools off the point, it almost feels as though you could walk there. Just beyond Brown's is Motuihi. It's from here, 42 years ago, that Peggy Kendall, nine months pregnant in the middle of winter, rowed her Mullet boat into the Tamaki Estuary, hoping that the effort would help induce the birth of her first-born.
Two weeks later, little Bruce was tucked into a carry-cot in the Mullet's cabin and was out on the harbour with his sea-hardened parents.
There's more than a pinch of salt running through the
Kendall clan's veins. And while it's true that their blood is thick enough to
withstand almost anything the water can throw at them, Bruce, at least, has
found it tested at times.
The gold medallist and former world champion windsurfer is aiming for an Olympic comeback, 24 years after he first set his sights on Olympic gold.
But the sea has refused to make anything easy for the
veteran.
First there was the 1984 Olympic bronze medal, which in
Kendall's mind could have been gold. Then, after taking gold in 1988, all hopes
of a repeat four years later were dashed when faulty equipment left him with a
broken fin and fourth place. He broke his neck in 1990.
Then four years ago, he was involved in a near-fatal
accident that threatened to keep him off the water forever.
He was in waters off Greece, coaching windsurfers, when
the rigid inflatable boat he was driving collided with top American boardsailer
Kimberley Birkenfeld, leaving her with life-threatening injuries.
Kendall leapt into the water, dragged Birkenfeld aboard
and resuscitated her. "It was horrible," he says, speaking publicly
for the first time about the incident. "Just the act of being involved in
an accident with somebody that you know, and you have to jump into the water,
and they're face down unconscious in the water, not breathing, and you have to
swim to the boat with them, get them into the boat, breathe for them and not
lose my head - make sure I did everything properly, and kept her alive, and
basically got her going again.
"If I hadn't started her breathing, she would have
died. I had to breathe for her. For a boat ride that would have been approximately
from here to Brown's Island away.
"And then, ending up in a Greek hospital with no
one speaking English, covered in blood with no one knowing what I was doing
there, and the strong smell of blood. The whole incident was extremely
traumatic."
Official reports reveal he and the two witnesses to the
crash told authorities that Birkenfeld had been heading straight for them, and
there was nothing he could have done to avoid her. Though she couldn't recall
anything of the crash, Birkenfeld later deduced that it must have been Kendall
who was at fault.
What followed has been a pro-tracted legal battle, with
Birkenfeld seeking millions in damages.
Kendall, once her friend and coach, has been forced to
stay silent about much of the accident. There is so much he clearly would like
to say today, but instead, he stares out over his beloved bay, his eyes
glassing over with grief.
"It's been horrible. I think it's been the worst
thing that's ever happened. It's just horrible," he says.
"There's one thing that I've always had in the back
of my mind since I was very young. If you can get through life without hurting
anyone or upsetting somebody, I'd be happy. That's all I really wanted to
achieve.
"At one stage, I didn't even want to race any more.
And that was before I even went to any of the Olympic Games, when I figured out
I was better than most people in New Zealand and could win easily if I wanted
to. At the same time I realised that people really don't like getting beaten,
and a lot get pissed off with you for it. So I nearly stopped because I believe
in that philosophy of 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'.
"What a horrible thing," he continues. But he
can't really say anything more about it.
He did, however, think briefly of not returning to the
water. But with family and friends supporting him, he continued to coach.
Then late last year, his old friend, former windsurfing
student and world champion Aaron McIntosh, called with a crazy idea to launch
an Olympic campaign sailing a twin-hulled Tornado. Kendall had never raced
Tornados before. But it was an opportunity to distract himself with something
that was entirely full of hope and promise. Kendall would revive his Olympic
dream.
He's always been an unlikely athlete. Now a wily 71kg
and 175cm tall, Kendall was too slow and uncoordinated at school to be marked
as someone likely to achieve as an athlete. When he was a teenage windsurfing
competitor, Olympic officials once worried that he was too much of a
free-thinking hippy to make a top sportsman.
He used to rev himself up for races by listening to the
punk band the Dead Kennedys, has read the Bible from start to finish, spends
time meditating and surfing, and prides himself on putting on the wickedest
dance parties.
He shares that slightly dopey Kendall smile, which the
sun has etched permanently into his features, and bohemian air with his sister
Barbara, also a top boardsailor. But Kendall warns that when it comes to
competitive sports, impressions can be deceptive.
"Everybody has masks. You put different ones on for
different times. I come across as not being the most academic person, and I
don't look physically like a high performance athlete. I mean, I walk around
the beach seeing all these guys with these amazing physiques and six packs and
zero fat, and I think 'Crikey, I've got to compete against them, you know, with
my skinny arms, and I've never had a six-pack in my life'.
"I've tried to get there, I just never got
there."
His edge is his intensity of mind, he reckons, which can
push his body to breaking point and freak people out in the process.
There is another Kendall sister - Wendy - who he reckons
was a better sailor than Barbara for a while. But she never made it to the top
in competitive sports. "She just doesn't have that sort of - for want of a
better word - killer instinct. I know it might sound strange, but in my
opinion, you've got to want to win more than the person next to you. So you
have to be prepared to suffer more than the person next to you.
"A lot of races I'd finish, I could taste blood.
From pushing myself that hard, and I'd come through the finish line and just
lie down and try to relax my heart and my lungs just to stay alive."
Now, after coaching for five years, Kendall reckons he
is ready to throw himself back into competition.
McIntosh had been racing Tornados since 2003 and, with
original partner Mark Kennedy, did well enough in the world champs to qualify
for a small amount of Government funding for a new Olympic campaign.
Then Kennedy suddenly fell ill with glandular fever, and
Kendall was asked to replace him.
They have been a team of sorts since Kendall took
16-year-old McIntosh under his wing, watching as the young sailor eventually
took his own world championship boardsailing crown in 1994.
They've worked together on and off since, but never
sailed competitively on the same vessel till now.
Their desire to grab Olympic glory is not an impossible
task, but even the most generous of pundits would say it's a tricky one.
They're competing against teams who have worked together for years and, in some
cases, have sailed on twin hulls for decades.
They have almost no money - they're staging an auction
and dinner fundraiser in two weeks to raise spare cash to get to the World
Champs in Argentina in November - and their base is a converted shipping
container on the grass outside the Buckland's Beach Yacht Club. While their
European rivals bask in close to million-dollar annual budgets, McIntosh and
Kendall are aiming to get to Beijing on $100,000 a year between them, which
includes what they need to feed themselves and McIntosh's young family of four.
Nevertheless, says Kendall, what they do have is
experience on the Olympic and world stages and an insatiable hunger to win.
Don't people say it's crazy, that he's a 42-year-old
windsurfer? "I'm sure there are some people out there who have said that,
but I haven't heard anything negative yet," Kendall laughs.
Whether or not it will be his last time at the Olympics,
he's not sure. The question makes him smile. He knows this is a unique
opportunity for someone his age.
"I hate to admit it, but it would be very
difficult, probably impossible, for me now to get back on a [windsurfing] board
and be competitive. I'm 42, and I have a number of injuries from different
things. A Tornado campaign is still physically very demanding, but there's more
to it than that. In the Tornado class, a lot of the guys are older, and it
comes down a little bit more to experience."
Of that he has plenty - ecstatic Olympic highs and
devastating lows.
It was a particularly hard pill to swallow to lose
everything in 1992 simply because the manufacturers of the gear that year had
failed to put enough layers of resin on his board's fin.
Despite repeated appeals from the entire NZ committee,
he came fourth after the accident.
For the Kendall clan, it was a bitter-sweet day. In the
last race of the day, Barbara secured her gold medal. At almost exactly the
same time, her brother was told it was all over for him.
"It was really horrible, because I couldn't enjoy
her win because I was so upset about my thing.
"I think I cried at the time. Not for long. But I
just tried to distance myself from everything for a while. I did a bit of
mountain biking. Then, when I came back to New Zealand for two months after the
Olympic Games, it was my first conscious thought when I woke up in the morning.
What a horrible way to start your day."
So why put himself through the intensity of the Olympics all over again? There is the obvious distraction from the Birkenfeld drama. But otherwise it's really very simple. "I really like racing boats. And I like doing anything at a high level. The Tornado is in my opinion one of the ultimate racing yachts in the world, and it's in the Olympic games which is the ultimate yacht racing Everest."
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