Bruce Kendall—a thrill-seeker at heart

Press, 27 September 1988, Page 26

Bruce Kendall—a thrill-seeker at heart

By

PETER

HALL WRIGHT of NZPA in Pusan There are not many sports that the Olympic gold medal boardsailor, Bruce Kendall, will sit down and watch, but he makes an exception for downhill ski-ing, Formula Qne and motorcycle road races. “Those guys are my heroes,” he says. It fits. His coach and friend Grant Beck describes the 24-year-old Aucklander as a “thrillseeker’s thrill-seeker.” Kendall admits it. He says there’s nothing quite like the adrenalin of coming into a mark “fully powered up at 25 knots,” with half a dozen other riders bearing down and a split second to get everything right. Or free-falling 15 feet I from the lip of a perfect wave, or 30 feet straight off the top of a breaker: “It’s quite a buzz,” said Kendall. The Olympics are a little bit different. One touch of another board and you’re disqualified,

one misjudged tack and you’re in the protest room. “It takes a lot of the excitement out of racing because there’s so much at stake,” he said. “A lot of people’s careers are on the line.” Why does' he do it then? “I guess I’m pretty competitive. I like beating guys that used to beat me.” And there’s the special competition of sailing the one-design boards. With funboards, which Kendall races on the world circuit most of the year round, it’s hard to tell whether you win because you’re fast or because it’s, the equipment. On the Lechner Division II sailboards, he says: “It’s you against the other guy with the same stuff.” . Beck rates the Los Angeles : bronze medal winner Kendall “the most competitive guy in wind-' surfing,” and that includes the 1984 gold medallist, Stephan Vandeberg, and the silver-medallist, Scott Steele.

“He drives himself harder than both of those guys,” Beck said. “He doesn’t understand what ‘quit’ means.” That is why Kendall can come off the water furious as he did when he finished eighth in Sunday’s fifth race in the Olympic regatta. “He doesn’t believe that anyone else is better;” Beck said. “If he’s going slower, he’s unhappy with his performance.” “A lot of it is determination, and he has very, very, good concentration and self discipline.” Kendall doesn’t consider himself especially talented. “Most of it’s just hard work and having that fear of losing to drive me on,” he said. The hard work goes back to Kendall’s teenage days windsurfing at Bucklands Beach, when he realised he would have to start training seriously to get results. The self-discipline was there from the start as well. In the early eighties

the sport was growing fast with new boards and sailing styles coming out all the time. But the 16-year-old Kendall wanted to win races, and that meant concentrating on the Division I boards of the time: the Superstar, the. Elysee and the Sea Skate. “I had to discipline myself not to goof off and have fun,” he said. Time on the water — the key to his fitness and his remarkable skill — have cost him plenty over the years. It cost him his first attempt at University Entrance: “I was windsurfing too much.” He succeeded the second time round, in 1982, after his first trip to Los Angeles for the preOlympics. It paid off in Los Angeles where he trained for two months before the regatta. The bronze medal opened a lot of doors. He got invitations to more and more events — enough to make one thing possible: “Being able to

windsurf whenever I like.” ’ Now the grass seems greener on the other side. Training and competition costs him all the things .he envies in his old friends: their careers, their houses, smart cars and stable relationships. Travelling for all but 10 weeks of the.year on the world funboard circuit leaves him with no people or place of his own, little money and a $l6OO car in Auckland that does not run. Windsurfing is not big enough in New Zealand to generate the sort of sponsorship he needs to travel and compete with the best equipment. Kendall is hoping to pick up some heavier backing from outside the industry, preferably within New Zealand. Dropping out of the sport does not seem to be an option, though. If Kendall takes a break, he only has to start talking about it to feel the old excitement again. “I’m a bit of a hopeless case really,” he said. “I’m sort of addicted to it.”