Kiwi Gold Sailing team Rick Dodson, Andrew May and Craig Sharp have come a long way to get so close to Olympic qualification. The just have one final hurdle.
The three members of disabled sailing team Kiwi Gold have all had tough roads to travel, and now must conquer some rough seas to reach the Rio Olympics. They tell Dana Johannsen about their quest for the next year's Paralympics.
Rick Dodson won't let up.
Pitted against the Australians, one of the top-ranked disabled sailing teams in the world, in a series of training races in Melbourne, the former Team NZ strategist's competitiveness surges like a spring swell as his Kiwi Gold crew race bow to stern with their opposition.
Multiple sclerosis has wreaked havoc with some of Dodson's internal wiring, slowing the transmission of messages between his brain and his nervous system. His eye-sight, balance and co-ordination aren't what they used to be, but his tactical awareness remains as sharp as ever.
He tacks and gybes right on top of the Australians, never allowing any breathing space as he tailgates them across the course.
"You could almost see Richard's eyes glaze over and the old America's Cup strategy kicking in," says Don Cowie, the coach of Kiwi Gold Sailing and a veteran of three America's Cup campaigns himself.
"I had to tell him a couple of times to rein it in, he was gybing on them and tacking on them and yelling and screaming. So he's still got it, that's for sure."
For the past 18 months, however, most of Dodson's battles have been fought off the water.
He's seen his former Team NZ crewmate and Kiwi Gold original, David Barnes, who also suffers from MS, forced to quit the campaign after his health rapidly declined. He's gone through the months of uncertainty while the team remained in a holding pattern as they searched for a replacement for Barnes.
And he, with the help of a small but committed group of supporters, has battled through funding shortfalls that kept the team from competing in any international regattas this year.
Having endured all these setbacks, this week's para world sailing championships in Melbourne will be the Kiwi Gold team of Dodson, Andrew May and Chris Sharp's last chance to qualify for the 2016 Paralympics in Rio.
Now is not the time to be letting up.
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Team Kiwi Gold was launched in 2013 to what was considered great fanfare for a Paralympic campaign. Disabled athletes don't tend to garner much recognition for their sporting feats, but here was an irresistible tale.
Two greats from New Zealand sailing's golden era - Dodson and Barnes - both, by some cruel coincidence, diagnosed with MS at around the same time in the late-90s. After gentle coercion by some of the big-wigs at Yachting New Zealand, they decided to band together to give the Paralympics a crack and recruited May, a two-time Paralympian who has been wheelchair bound since a car accident in his teens, to join them in the Sonar class.
High profile supporters were also quick to jump on board. It took a 30-second conversation between team manager Mike Clark and Neville Chricton for the automobile tycoon to write out a cheque for $60,000 to buy the team's first boat, while Sir Michael Fay is a mentor for the campaign.
Dodson and Barnes were even the catalyst to getting Grant Dalton and Sir Russell Coutts in the same room ahead of the 2013 America's Cup, with the two archrivals going head to head in a public debate in the name of charity.
On the water they had plenty of support as well, with many of Dodson and Barnes' former crew mates at Team NZ - including Warwick Fleury, Matt Mason and Tony Rae - stopping by whenever they were in the country to train against Kiwi Gold.
The team were confident of success ahead of their first opportunity to qualify for Rio at last year's world championships in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Having placed eighth the year before in Ireland in their first international, a podium finish looked well within their grasp.
That confidence unravelled on day one of the regatta, when Barnes' health took a drastic turn.
"He had an MS attack and it completely wiped him out," recalls Celia Snedden, Dodson's sister and chief wrangler."He sent us an email on that first night and said, 'I don't know what's happened, it feels like I've been hit by a bus'."
Without the time or money to get their reserve crew member, Wanaka-based Quentin Smith, to Halifax, the team had no choice but to take the ailing Barnes, who was barely able to move, out on the water with them each day in order to comply with the class rules.
They were effectively sailing the three-man boat shorthanded.
"We ended up making a lot of mistakes, there was all that added stress. It felt like we had our hands full the entire time," May says.
It was to be Barnes' last regatta with the team. After stepping onto the plane in Auckland, he returned home in a wheelchair.
David Barnes and Dennis Conner pose for a photo in San Diego during the 1988 America's Cup. Photo / Mark Mitchell
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With MS, the immune system - for reasons doctors still don't entirely understand - starts attacking and consuming the fatty insulation that surrounds the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, known as myelin.
Myelin acts like the rubber insulation found in an electrical cable and facilitates the smooth transmissionof high-speed messages from the brain to the spinal cord and the rest of the body. As areas of myelin are affected, messages are not sent efficiently or they never reach their destination.Eventually, there is a build-up of scar tissue (sclerosis) in multiple places where myelin has been lost.
After nearly two decades living with this faulty wiring, Dodson is matter-of-fact about his condition.
"You'll have to excuse me, I walk and talk like I've had a few too many drinks," he says by way of introduction.
Indeed, the only outward signs of Dodson's condition are in his gait and speech. His right leg doesn't cooperate with him, as though it is attached to a string that someone else controls. He speaks with a slur, his words tumbling from his mouth in a rush of mashed syllables.
But speech difficulties haven't dulled Dodson's love of spinning a good yarn. Cheeky and engaging, Dodson still enjoys an audience.
In explaining how the classification system works for the Paralympics, Dodson tells of how there have been some cases where athletes have tried to cheat the system.
"The Spanish once fielded a women's football team that were all men!" he says shaking his head, before May corrects him:
"It was a basketball team, and they faked their intellectual disability."
A strategist for Team New Zealand's triumphant 1995 and 2000 campaigns, Dodson was known as one of the more jovial characters on board - the type that didn't take himself too seriously and paid-out anyone who did.
Rick Dodson was a member of the Team New Zealand afterguard at the 1995 America's Cup.
You might remember Dodson from one of the more infamous moments in New Zealand television, when, during an interview with PJ Montgomery in the midst of the wild celebrations on board NZL-32 following Team NZ's crushing victory in San Diego in 1995, he dropped a few f-bombs on live television. He further compounded his mistake by adding "I'm not allowed to use the word f***am I?"
Those heady scenes were repeated five years later when Team NZ defended the Cup in Auckland. But in between those two great highlights of his sporting career, came the low of his diagnosis.
It came out of the blue, having taken himself off to the doctor to sort out vision problems he was having.
"The doctor realised there was more going on than just my eyesight, so I went to the specialist and that's where I was told I had MS," says Dodson, who remembers the time of his diagnosis well, as it was the same week Princess Diana died.
While the world mourned the People's Princess, Dodson lamented the loss of life as he knew it. His symptoms were still relatively minor, but who knew where he would be next month or next year.
He told few outside of his family of his diagnosis, taking the approach that it would be business as usual. The only person aboard Black Magic that knew of his condition was his close friend and pitman Jeremy Scantlebury - a man Dodson knew he could trust to tell him if he wasn't up to the job anymore.
"I said if it's hindering my performance on the boat, tell me and I'll step aside," Dodson recalls.
Scantlebury never had to have that conversation with him. In fact Dodson went on to take part in another America's Cup campaign, the 2003 Louis Vuitton Cup with US syndicate OneWorld.
It was a long haul for Dodson. Towards the end of the event he began to experience more and more difficulties on board as his eyesight deteriorated and he struggled with his balance and co-ordination. He knew his days as a professional sailor were numbered.
"It was quite hard to give it away. It would be like someone saying to you, you can't write any more. So you have to go away and think, 'Well, can I do something else?'I couldn't. I'm a sailor - being on the water is what I live for."
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Kiwi Gold Sailing para-sailing members L-R Craig Sharp, Rick Dodson and Andrew May. Photo / Nick Reed
The loss of Barnes nearly spelt the end for Kiwi Gold, says Snedden.
"I had sleepless nights thinking, 'How on earth are we going to find someone?'"
Not only did the team need a good yachtie to replace the experienced Barnes, they needed someone that fit the complicated Paralympics classification matrix.
With Paralympic sailing, the athletes are classified 1-7 depending on their level of impairment. In the three-person sonar class, the team must have a collective total of 14.
Dodson is classified a six, May a four, so they needed to find another four.
But their four was in hiding, still getting to grips with becoming, well, a four, after a split-second mistake.
"I was living up North basically as a recluse, trying to get my head around being like this," Sharp says, gesturing to the wheelchair he has been confined to for the past five years.
An arborist by trade, Sharp's big loves were the ocean and motorbikes.
He was chaperoning his two of his sons, who were relatively new to motorcycling, around the Coromandel Loop - a popular route for motorcyclists - when disaster struck.
"Dawdling" along at the back on his built-for-speed ducati, Sharp disappeared off the road and it wasn't until a couple of minutes later that his sons realised he was gone.
It was a further half an hour before they found him, slumped over the handle bars of his bike that had piled into some trees hidden behind a bush.
"I wasn't a very live boy when they picked me up," says Sharp. "I had no signs of life so my son took my helmet off and tilted my head back and I started to breathe again. So they took me to hospital where I died a few more times. Over three weeks I kept dying."
In between keeping Sharp alive, doctors worked overtime to repair his catalogue of injuries. He'd broke nhis collarbones, ribs - "pretty much everything"- and punctured his lungs. But there was nothing that could be done to repair his spinal cord, which had been severed on impact when he broke his back in four places.
Those with a particularly dark sense of humour may point out the irony of an arborist and motorcycle enthusiast paralysed after crashing into a tree.
Sharp could manage the dark part, but there wasn't a lot of humour in his Opito Bay home, just outside Kerikeri, for many years after his accident.
It took the persistence of a close family friend, Andrea Kendall, who had heard of Kiwi Gold's predicament, to convince Sharp to get back into sailing.
"She rang me every day for three weeks until I just gave up and said, 'Okay, I'll come down and have a sail with them.' It was the best thing I ever did."
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Having a new challenge to throw himself into has helped Sharp re-engage with the world.
"If you look at Chris I think this has been a saviour for him. He's so incredibly determined and focused on it," says Cowie.
"My sports world is back," Sharp agrees."One of the Oracle guys has booked me as of next year. When this is all over he and I are going to race together on his boat. And I've now got a bunch of friends saying, 'Right, now you've got to sail with us as well'."
He also plans to get back up on a windsurfer this summer ("there'll be a way"), while his nephew James Gell, a boatbuilder at Oracle's Warkworth facility, has bolder plans.
"He makes and designs foiling kiteboards. He said, 'Chris, I'm bringing you out one at Christmas and we're going to get you up on this thing.' So I can't wait. It's going to be embarrassingly bad, but we'll figure out a way."
If Kiwi Gold Sailing has breathed life back into Sharp, equally you could say he has had the same effect on the team.
The team's psyche was in a bad place when they returned from Halifax down a team member and having failed to qualify the boat for Rio. But Sharp's enthusiasm and willingness to get stuck in has helped reinvigorate the team.
"This not just some kind of rehabilitation ride for [Chris]. He's got the energy and drive to get the result. This is a serious, competitive campaign that we're involved in and that's the attitude he brings," says May.
"His energy and enthusiasm has been great for us. He spent hours upside down on the bottom of that boat grinding fibreglass just to make us go that little bit faster. And that's a horrible bloody job."
With a building background and a practical bent, Sharp took it upon himself to take a leading role in boat maintenance and was soon appointed as the "on-land skipper", with Dodson remaining the "on-the-ropes skipper".
Dealing with the fatigue that comes with MS - not just tiredness, but chronic, debilitating exhaustion - means Dodson often struggles to motivate himself, let alone the team.
Snedden says having Sharp manage the gear and getting the team on the water in time has been a godsend.
Kiwi Gold Sailing members Rick Dodson and Andrew May sailing out on the Waitemata Harbour. Photo / Nick Reed
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The hours upon hours the team have spent out on the Waitemata Harbour in Maserati, their aspirationally named boat, has put them in good nick heading into the world champs, where they must finish in the top seven to qualify for Rio.
But the one box they haven't been able to tick in their build-up is experiencing the pressure of international competition, with budget constraints preventing Kiwi Gold from attending any other major regattas this year.
"I think boat preparation-wise and what we call their short-course training - going around marks and putting the jib out - will be as good if not better than anyone else," says Cowie."But their race management might be where they're a little weak because they haven't done a lot of racing against other Sonar."
The lack of international competition this year is an especially big deal for Sharp, who estimates he has not competed in a major regatta for 30 years.
A champion skiff sailor as a young man, Sharp, now 57, looked set for a career in the boatbuilding industry when he began a sailmaking apprenticeship under Chris Bouzaid.
But towards the end of the last year of his apprenticeship his wife Mary got pregnant with their first child, forcing Sharp to re-think the economics of his chosen profession. He decided to take up a job overseas in the construction industry, and as the demands of family took over, sailing moved further down his priority list.
"In my younger years Dave [Barnes] and I used to race against each other. I'm of the era of Dave, Rick, Russell Coutts, Chris Dickson - all of the guys that were of that early Team NZ era are all my mates that I sailed against when I was in my early 20s. So when we go out training with them now, they all say, 'We knew you were coming back, we just didn't realise you were going to be so slow getting there'.
"I love the competition. The competitions we've done have all been here, so getting over to Melbourne and then hopefully to Europe and then to Rio, I just can't wait to rip people apart.
"Performance wise," he adds.
Having been unable to pull together the funds to compete overseas this year, there is some uncertainty over what happens if and when the team qualify for Rio.
Achieving the qualifying standard is no guarantee they will be selected for the Games - that lies in the hands of the Yachting New Zealand selectors. The national body have so far kept their distance from the Kiwi Gold campaign, offering encouragement, but little in the way of tangible support.
However, Yachting NZ's high performance director, Jez Fanstone will be in Melbourne this week to watch Kiwi Gold, and New Zealand's other Paralympic hopefuls - Tim Dempsey and Gemma Fletcher in the SKUD18, and Paul Francis in the 2.4mR keelboat class - compete.
The crews will likely need to demonstrate over the next week they are capable of medalling in Rio, but this is assumed - as yet Kiwi Gold has had no official word of what they need to achieve results-wise in Melbourne.
Cowie says the sooner the team can be selected, the better chance they will have in Rio - a venue he believes will suit the trio - as it will allow them to forge ahead with plans to attend another training camp with the Australians (yes, they were invited back) in Brazil in January, and attend several top-class Sonar regattas in Europe.
"I'm hoping [YNZ] will see the talent on board this boat. Even if they don't get on the podium in Melbourne, I think they've got the talent and the ability and the support they need to be a medal prospect in Rio, provided they can get to the events next year that they need to get to before Rio," says Cowie.
It's that last proviso that keeps Snedden awake late at night. She estimates the team will need to find $175,000 if they are to compete in a full regatta programme before Rio.
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May is all too familiar with this type of conundrum.
He has been to two Paralympics, competing in the 1996 Games in Atlanta in the Sonar, and in the 2.4mR class in Sydney four years later.
The 39 year-old easily qualified for the Beijing Games in 2008, but his campaign was scuttled when he was unable to secure the funding to take part in the required lead-up events in Europe.
"It almost became that a campaign was more about raising money than it was about going sailing. I'm not passionate about fundraising - it's not my vocation in life - but I am about sailing, so it became a bit of a conflict. It was a bit demoralising," he says.
"But I do regret not making it to Beijing, because in the end it was an event that was suited to my conditions. I had the opportunity to do really well."
That sense of unfinished business is what made him jump at the chance when Dodson and Barnes came calling in early 2013. Just as was the case with the two America's Cup veterans, Kiwi Gold Sailing also offered May a second shot.
Growing up in yachting family in Diamond Harbour on the Banks Peninsula, May's early sailing years is your typical rite of passage for water-borne youngsters, starting out in the Optimist and P-classes. He switched to double-handed classes in his teens, winning the Phoenix national championships at 16.
At 17, a few days after Christmas 1994, he was in an "innocuous" car accident that halted his sailing career.
He and some friends were heading into Akaroa township when they crossed the centre line and ran head-on into an oncoming car.
"It wasn't a massive crash - we weren't going that quick. It was just unfortunate that we were in an older car that didn't have seatbelts in the back."
The impact of the accident sent the passenger in the back seat flying forward, breaking May's seat and seatbelt in the process. The chain reaction ended with May headbutting the dashboard, breaking his neck and dislocating his back.
"It was just the mechanics of the stopping that caused it. It wasn't particularly painful... well over the weeks coming it was. But there were no external marks or cuts or bruises. It was just all the force was absorbed in those two points in my body," he explains.
"It knocked me out for about 30 seconds and then my head cleared and I thought, 'I feel a bit weird.' And then I knew exactly what had happened."
May says he was back on the water pretty much straight away after getting out of hospital. Sailing had become much more than a sport to him, more a lifeline.
"I don't know where I'd be if I didn't have sailing to turn to."
Kiwi Gold Sailing para-sailing members Rick Dodson (left), Andrew May (centre) and Craig Sharp (right). Photo / Nick Reed
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Money may be in short supply for Kiwi Gold, but goodwill is not.
A large cross-section of the sailing community has chipped in to offer the team time, resources and equipment to help with the campaign. Members of Team NZ both past and present are regulars down at the team's compound on the city end of Westhaven Marina, training against Dodson and co in the team's second boat.
Snedden chuckles as she recalls a time earlier this year when the team put the call out for volunteers to help wet-sand the boat.
"My husband [Tim] said to me, 'People hate doing that, you'll never get volunteers.' Next thing down at the boat you've got Simon Daubney and Warwick Fleury in their Oracle gear, [Tony Rae] and Daggy [James Dagg] in their Team NZ gear, all helping wet-sand this boat."
The Oracle connection has come in handy when it comes to getting equipment made for the boat. It only took a few hours on the water with Kiwi Gold for Sharp, the team's forward hand, to realise the boat wasn't well set up for a paraplegic.
So he designed a cockpit to clip in at the front of the boat, to allow him something to brace against while he adjust the trims and sails and provide greater ease of movement at mark roundings. Core Composites, Oracle's boat building facility in Warkworth, turned Sharp's crude plywood prototype into carbon fibre artistry.
Cowie offered his coaching expertise for a fraction of what he would usually cost, and will be in Melbourne this week offering technical support to not only Kiwi Gold, but the other New Zealand crews competing there as well.
"I wouldn't put the time into these guys if I thought they were tyre-kickers. I just don't have the time to do that," says Cowie, who spends a large chunk of the year coaching overseas.
And then there's Murray Rae.
Rae, the father of former Team NZ veteran Tony, is Kiwi Gold's chase boat driver and odd job man. At 76 and with two knee replacements behind him Rae still has boundless energy. He's with the team every day they go out sailing, arriving early to help prepare the boat for launch, and will be the last to leave, only once all the jobs are done and Maserati is tucked away back in the shed.
Getting the chance to work with the team, he says, is "an absolute privilege" and has even sparked a desire in him to compete again. Rae, who finished sixth at the 1960 Olympics in the Flying Dutchman class, is considering taking part in the World Masters Games when they come to Auckland in 2017 - "If I'm still around then."
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There's so much more on the line in Melbourne this week than the team's Paralympics hopes.
It's not just for the likes of Rae, Snedden, Cowie, and the rest of the support crew that Kiwi Gold are determined to do well at the regatta, which gets under way tomorrow. They so desperately want to improve the sport's standing in New Zealand.
Dodson, who has won just about every major prize in yachting - as well as his success in the America's Cup he's skippered teams to One Ton Cup and Admirals Cup victories - can't fathom how New Zealand leads the way in virtually all forms of sailing, yet don't feature in disabled sailing.
"We want disabled sailing to have a profile here, but to do that we have to go out and win regattas,"he says.
The bigger picture is what drives Sharp as well and led him to do things he never expected, like public speaking, interviews and even posing for photos.
"Public speaking is not something I'm even slightly conditioned to," he says."I've had more scares while I've been doing this than I ever had at the top of 100-foot trees. Putting yourself in front of people is scary. But it a cause I am so passionate about."
He's interested to know what I, the writer, have learned from my time out on the water with the team. Had I noticed anything different about the way they sailed the boat compared to others?
"Not really," I say, "you guys seem to have a workaround for everything."
Sharp seems pleased with this observation.
"That's right," he says. "Nothing is insurmountable, there's always a way - you just have to want to look for it."
