[SPORT] Angela Madsen, the Paralympic T-shirt that crossed the Pacific alone, dies

[YaKuZa--BoSs]

Wanted to be the first paraplegic and the oldest woman able to paddle across the Pacific

 

 

When Angela Madsen had gone a day without showing any signs of life, all the alarms went off. Her challenge was enormous: she wanted to be the first paraplegic and the oldest woman capable of rowing the Pacific Ocean from Los Angeles to Honolulu. And the expectation was high. So on Monday morning, 24 hours after its last update, the search began with multiple means. A United States Coast Guard helicopter and a German freighter scoured the area where Madsen's boat was supposed to be and eventually found it.

Madsen had died hours earlier and her body was in the water tied to the boat. No one knows what happened. "When I checked her email, she hadn't returned a message," said Debra, her wife. "By satellite tracking, it did not appear that she was rowing the boat, but was adrift. She was very far from land and communication can be difficult; she had hopes but already felt a feeling of heaviness in her chest," she acknowledged in. your Facebook profile.

Madsen left Marina del Rey, California, in a rowing boat in April, with the goal of reaching the Hawaii Yacht Club, in Honolulu, in four months. She had been at sea alone for 60 days in which she had paddled some 2,000 kilometers from Los Angeles. More or less, she was halfway to her destination. Angela's trip was going to be material for a documentary, so even though she was alone, she frequently communicated with the filmmakers and his wife, Debra. After not knowing anything about Angela from the previous day, when she said that she was going to enter the water to fix a detail of the boat, the search began.

In addition to rowing, a modality in which she had achieved several Guinness records, Madsen was known in athletics, where she had won the bronze medal in shot put at the London 2012 Paralympic Games. She and her partner Helen Taylor were the first women to paddle across the Indian Ocean.

Her paraplegia was born in an accident in 1980 in one of her first training sessions in the United States Marine Corps. She fell in an exercise, another soldier fell on top of her and broke two discs in her spine. In the subsequent operation, in addition, a surgical error extended the affected one. For years she was in litigation with her country's army, which refused to pay her medical bills, and in the end Madsen lost her home. She also separated from her husband and fell into depression. Years later, after making her sexual condition public and rebuilding her life, she got to know the sport in a wheelchair thanks to the Veterans of the Marines and began a career as a paralympic.