Surf Ski . Info - THE CULEBRA CHALLENGE: Following a Legend

THE CULEBRA CHALLENGE: Following a Legend

Written by Joe Glickman

Monday, 10 March 2008

I walked into the hotel bar on Saturday night and found Ian Gray nursing a beer, reclining as far back in the high-backed chair as he could without slipping off.

Ian Gray wins the 2008 Culebra Challenge

We were in Culebra, a small island 17 miles east of Puerto Rico, in an open-air café overlooking a turquoise lagoon that once served as a hiding place for pirates. He barely looked up when I greeted him, his normally bright blue eyes mere slits. After 36 hours of travel -- with stops in Johannesburg, Dakar, Washington, D.C. St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, San Juan, and finally, Culebra -- the articulate lad I'd come to know looked as if he'd been smoking copious amounts of roasted iguana droppings.

In just 12 hours we were to line up for the second edition of the Culebra Challenge, a World Cup race that featured just two dozen paddlers vying for a total purse of $3,000. Though it received a three-star rating - the race is 100% downwind - Culebra is far enough removed from epicenters of ski paddling to keep the Oscars, Dawids and Deanos of the world at home. In addition, there were a limited number of skis for hire, further reducing the number of entries.

Ian, who was 12th in the World Rankings before the race, had been training full on for the past two months in Durban with the likes of Clint Pretorius, Daryl Bartho, and Barry Lewin. He had to be thinking that he had a legitimate chance to beat pre-race favorite Greg Barton and notch the first major win of his budding paddling career.

"Quickly," I asked. "What day is it?"

I think he understood the question and I'm pretty sure he recognized me, but he didn't seem able to come up with an answer. Greg Barton and I had met in San Juan on Thursday and ferried over to Culebra Friday morning. Our paddles off Culebra those last two days had been just what the doctor ordered. The wind had been pumping all week at 15 to 20 knots - a perfect tail wind - and the swell was five to seven feet. The warm clean water was multiple shades of blue. I'd been paddling my K1 in frigid Brooklyn for the past two month, wearing so much gear I could have napped in a freezer, and I chased the frothy bumps the way a puppy would a butterfly: with too much energy and too little finesse, but loving it all the same.

Before I met Ian at the US Surf Ski Champs in San Francisco this September, I'd never even heard of him. The day before the race he and I paddled together along the cliffs north of the Golden Gate Bridge. As the wind picked up, so did his pace. I sat on his stern wash, thinking, "Don't know who he is, but he's a beast!" Ian finished 11th, just seconds behind US Olympian Rami Zur.

In October we raced around Manhattan. For much of the first two and a half hours of that grueling race, the 27-year-old from Durban sat at the sharp end of the diamond that included Barton, Herman Chalupsky, and Zsolt Szadovszki, a former member of the Hungarian National Team. Relaxed and modest off the water, in a boat the Gray One was strong, aggressive and willing to do the hard yards up front. Chalupsky, who won, hardly pulled a lick for the first two-thirds of the race. Gray paid for his diligence, finishing fourth.

As a kid, Gray swam and played judo competitively and surfed for fun. Rugby ("my next obsession") followed. He played for his university in Cape Town but at the ripe old age of 22 hung up his boots to concentrate on his degree in mechanical engineering. Apparently getting hit in the head repeatedly compromises your studies, even if your neck is as thick as a tree truck.

The factory where he worked in Johannesburg in 2004 was a short drive from the lake where Olympic hopeful Shaun Rubenstein and a bunch of other top SA paddlers trained. Ian was 23 when he climbed in a K1 for the first time. "I simply couldn't get enough of it," he said. When his job took him home to Durban in 2005, he gravitated towards the ski. Gray had planned to enroll in an MBA program in the US, but after a Men's Health race that year, Oscar Chalupsky persuaded him that a go on the world tour was eminently doable. (Of course, had he asked Oscar for a condo on the moon, the Big O would have said, "Hang on, I'll make a few calls.") Before you could say Mom, where's my passport? Gray sold everything save his board shorts and tooth brush and became a full-time itinerant surf ski paddler. The last time I'd seen him -- prior to finding him in this somnambulant state - he was chilling poolside in Dubai, a book in hand, his ever-present I-Pod cranking.

"Forget that question," I said. "What year is it?"

He rallied to answer. "Doesn't matter, boss," he said. "I'm here, aren't I? I'll be fine tomorrow."

I never did ask if he made it out of the chair that night.

Culebra 2008 - start (Pic: Harry Negron)

We started at 9 a.m. next to the ferry landing on the west side of the island. Just after the gun sounded, Federico Muskus, a former member of the Puerto Rican Sprint Team, blasted into the lead of a four-person pack that included Gray, Derick "Don't-Even-Try-to-Pronounce-My-Last-Name" Bezuidenhout, and Barton.

By the 2K mark Gray surged to the front. Barton jumped on his wake and the others fell back. Less than a kilometer later, we passed a deserted island off the west coast of Culebra and were out into the channel. The wind had backed off from the previous few days to around 10 to 12 knots, but the waves increased in size to about 1 to 2 meters (four to seven feet). Off in the distance, a full 30 kilometers away, were the twin towers that marked our finish. Uncharacteristically, Barton chased Gray for a few kilometers but then backed off. "My heart rate was too high to maintain that pace so early in the race," he said. "I decided to let Ian go and hope that he'd come back to me."

Greg Barton - pre-race (Pic: Harry Negron)

Handicapping the race before the start, I found it difficult to pick a winner. In his prime Greg been the best all-around paddler on the planet, winning four Olympic medals (two gold) and three World Championships at 10,000 meters. Barton's post-Olympic paddling success is even more remarkable when you consider that he has two young daughters, a prodigious work load and a demanding travel schedule, leaving him little time to train. Still, at the age of 45 he won the second of his two US Surf Ski Championship titles, and the next two years finished second behind Dawid Mocke. This year, the 48-year-old out-sprinted a decorated field to the Fenn Hot Spot and finished third overall behind Lewis Laughlin and Oscar. Gray was seven minutes behind Barton in that race. At the Mayor's Cup around Manhattan, he was four minutes behind; in Dubai, he was three back. Barton had just returned from a two weeks in China at the Epic factory where he'd worked big hours and trained not at all. Ian, meanwhile, had been logging two to three workouts a day, including two dices a week and 35K downwind sessions with Clint, Barry, and Daryl. And was 21 years younger.

Ian Gray mid channel (Pic: Harry Negron)

Ian's strategy, he said afterwards, was "to conserve for at least the first half and feel the pace out on the water until an opportunity came to make a move. Turns out that I found a gap a lot sooner than I had anticipated. After I opened a gap I didn't look back." He crossed the line two minutes ahead of Barton. "I'm not sure if he surfed better than I did," said Barton, "but he was fitter and stronger."

Further back, Derick B., a South African from East London now living in Tampa, Florida, finished third. Closing fast on fourth-place finisher Federico Muskus was Erik Borgnes. The paddling physician, who lives in frigid Wisconsin next to a lake frozen as solid as a sidewalk, did all of his training on an ergometer in his basement. "I felt like I could keep sprinting all day," he said afterwards.

Patrick Hemmens, raised in Cape Town but now one of the top ski paddlers in California, was sixth. The next three finishers, Hector Cartagena, race director Harry Negron, and Jaime Ponce - all members of the K4 squad that tried to qualify for the 1996 Olympic Games - were seventh through ninth. They'd been such gracious hosts all week that when Negron and Ponce out-sprinted me to the line I found it hard to manufacture any real resentment.

This was Harry's sixth Culebra crossing - a record by his own estimation - but he saw this race as a tribute to a swimming instructor named Alejandro Franco, the first paddler to make the crossing on a surf ski. "Franco was the man to beat for many years," Harry said. "He inspired us since he was always kicking our asses. We all wanted to beat Franco, that was the goal. He loved Culebra so much." In 2000, at the age of 53 he died of cancer. "This race is dedicated to him."

Jaime Ponce, full of energy at the finish (Pic: Harry Negron)

Joe Glickman looking for a cold beer (Pic: Harry Negron)

The hours we spent hanging out afterwards on the beach by a yacht club, Spanish music blaring from speakers, felt more like a friendly get-together than your typical post-World Cup bash. We'd gone to meals squeezed in the back of a pick-up driven by our Puerto Rican hosts, competed hard in training and talked a lot of shit. Just ask Juan Piscione, a professional sailor from Argentina who'd settled in St. Marteen. He paddled a flamboyant yellow-and-blue Burton ski that resembled a gay hammerhead shark and sang much of the way across the channel. Or ask Freya Hoffmeister, a German who'd recently become the first woman to paddle solo and unsupported around the South Island of New Zealand. Before she bumped into Oscar Chalupsky at a boat show in Hamburg, Freya had not known that surf skis existed. (Yes, Oscar convinced her to race.) And with just seven sessions under her belt she finished, five minutes behind Anitza Villalobos, a flat water paddler from San Juan with Olympic aspirations. Waiting for the last paddlers, I saw the former gymnast walking on her hands pool-side.

Frederico Musjus & Erik Borgnes - Culebra 2008

Frederico Musjus & Erik Borgnes (Pic: Harry Negron)

Before heading back to Old San Juan, I made sure to congratulate Ian. He was off to Tahiti with a check for $1,000 in his pocket to surf and train with Lewis Laughlin, then traveling on to New Zealand for the King of the Harbour (with a stop in Australia) before arriving in Hawaii for his first Molokai. "How'd you rank this win?" I asked.

"It's the most significant achievement of my life thus far. No question." His eyes were still puffy, but glowing with pride.

Photos courtesy of Harry Negron