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Essay - February 2004 The Race to 10 Molokai World Surf-Ski Championship Text by Joe Glickman Photos by Nels Akerlund The lone entrant from Brooklyn, New York, tells of competing in the Molokai World Surf-Ski Championship with some of the world’s greatest ocean paddlers. By Hawaiian standards, it was just another day in the Kaiwi (“kah-EE-vee”) Channel: eight-to-12 foot swell, 20-knot wind, chop and swirling currents. It was also the 27th running of the race known as Molokai—the unofficial world surf-ski championship—and nine-time winner Oscar Chalupsky, the big redhead from South Africa, was in trouble. An hour into the race, the valve on his three-liter water bladder popped open, emptying his sports drink. Now, with the island of Oahu looming large 20 miles into the  32-mile
race, the anxious skipper on Oscar’s escort boat shouted
to him that he was as much as 600 yards behind Australians Dean
Gardiner, the premier marathon paddler in that water-crazed country,
and 1992 Olympic kayaking gold medalist Clint Robinson, the greatest
ocean sprinter who’s ever lived. In his 10 previous starts at Molokai, Oscar’s lone loss was to Gardiner in 1999. It still rankled him. He was sure he had been the faster paddler—“far faster,” he insisted—but he had made a tactical error by not covering Dean, who took a better line to the finish. But there was even more at stake for Oscar than avenging that loss. Gardiner also had nine Molokai wins to his name. Each wanted to be the first to 10. For several minutes, Oscar chased, cutting the gap in half. When he backed off, the Australians regained their comfortable cushion. As Oscar would later say, “I had my doubts that I could come through.” |
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