Bruce Kendall rekindles Olympic dream

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."