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U.S. Paralympic Sailing Team Profile - Sonar |
U.S. Paralympic Sailing Team Profile. Sonar - Rick Doerr, Tim Angle and Bill Donohue.
Reaching the 2008 Paralympic Games in the Sonar class is an achievement Rick Doerr (Clifton, NJ), Tim Angle (Marblehead, MA) and Bill Donohue (Brick, NJ) have obtained through years of hard work and determination. And the name of their boat says it all: Valiant.
Skipper Doerr and his crew now bring their valiant Sonar campaign to the ultimate event: the 2008 Paralympic Regatta, which begins September 8 in Qingdao, China. Over the last two years, the team swept the international competition by bringing home gold medals from major events including the IFDS World Championship, US SAILING's U.S. Disabled Sailing Championship for the Independence Cup, and the C. Thomas Clagett Jr. Memorial Regatta just last month.
Doerr, Angle and Donohue each have a long history with the sport, before and after they became disabled, and each brings their own strengths and experiences to the team. In addition to their impressive on-the-water results, the team was named US SAILING's 2007 Paralympian Team of the Year for outstanding performance and achievement. In 2007, Doerr was named the U.S. Olympic Committee's Paralympic Athlete of the Year for sailing.
Rick Doerr
CLASS: Sonar
POSITION: Skipper
US DISABLED SAILING TEAM ALPHAGRAPHICS: 1998-2007
MEMBER OF: Noroton Yacht Club
HIGH SCHOOL: Montclair Kimberly Academy
COLLEGE: New England College (graduated 1982)
AGE: 47
BIRTHPLACE: Passaic, New Jersey
HOMETOWN: Clifton, New Jersey
OCCUPATION: Physician
SAILING SINCE AGE: 8
When you ask Rick Doerr, Paralympic skipper of the triplehanded Sonar, to name his most significant achievement in sailing, he does not answer his team’s win at last year’s IFDS Disabled Sailing World Championship, or their win at the U.S. Paralympic Team Trials, or the fact that his team has been the #1-ranked team on the US Disabled Sailing Team for three years. His reply is simply, 'sailing again after being disabled.'
Doerr is very much aware that the medals and accolades are the icing on the cake: the deeper reward is being able to play a game that let him reconnect to his past after a spinal cord injury in 1992. 'Sailing got me back to a place where I felt familiar after my injury,' says Doerr. 'When I started sailing again, my health improved.'
Doerr grew up on Barnegat Bay—racing Lightnings, Comets and catamarans—and his family and friends of his youth were avid sailors. 'At a young age, I was forced to crew for my older siblings, who were ruthless. One time, I lacerated my leg in a Lightning regatta and tried to walk away ...' But he was drawn back to the sport.
His first Paralympic class was the singlehanded 2.4mR, and he aced the fleet as a North American champion. But once he sailed the Sonar, which has active able-bodied and disabled competition in the U.S., he fell for a boat that he describes as 'well balanced, sensitive, and high performance' He also enjoys the great rewards of being a part of a team.
His career as a physician in plastic and reconstructive surgery is another passion. 'Some of the challenges of the race course prepare me for [my work],' he told Windcheck magazine. 'And some of the challenges of the O.R. help me put adversity on the racecourse into perspective.'
Doerr and his crew of Tim Angle and Bill Donohue arrived at the U.S. Trials in October ’07 looking golden. They were fresh from their win at the Worlds; they won three of the regatta’s four opening races. But that winning streak did not continue.
Back-of-the-fleet finishes and tough competition from U.S. skippers Paul Callahan and Albert Foster ensued, and the high-states Trials developed into a strategic mindgame for Doerr and his crew, which they won after nine days. Doerr found a silver lining in that struggle: 'The strong competition here in the U.S.,' he says, 'has only pushed us to another level.'
It seems fitting that Doerr would credit his rivals for only making him better, for his actions show that he is not only concerned about winning races but he cares about the community of disabled sailing—about making sure others who also have to put their lives back together after a traumatic accident have the same opportunities.
Doerr now serves as the Sonar Class President, as Disabilities Director of the New England Competitive Sailing Center, and as a board member of Sail Habilitation. 'It is my way of giving back to a sport that has provided me with so much, all my life.'
Complete profile click here
Tim Angle
CLASS: Sonar
POSITION: Crew
US DISABLED SAILING TEAM ALPHAGRAPHICS: 2001-2004, 2006-2008
MEMBER OF: Dolphin Yacht Club
HIGH SCHOOL: Marblehead High School
COLLEGE: University of Wisconsin, Madison (graduated 2003)
AGE DURING OLYMPICS: 30
BIRTHPLACE: Marblehead, Massachusetts
HOMETOWN: Marblehead, Massachusetts
OCCUPATION: Web and creative services manager
SAILING SINCE AGE: 8
Like every athlete competing at an elite level, Tim Angle’s life is jam-packed. For seven years he has campaigned a triplehanded Sonar with skipper Rick Doerr, in the hopes of making the U.S. team for the Paralympic Games. In the early days of the campaign, Angle was a college student studying electrical engineering (one term was compressed to six weeks of class to accommodate sailing). Today, as a manager at iRobot—a company that sells robots designed for everything from household to military use—his time at regattas is mixed with heavy doses of daily computer time, to keep things running smoothly at work.
And as if he doesn’t have enough responsibilities to juggle, in May, he's taking maternity leave. But he is not an expectant father. Angle is hoping for another type of milestone: a Paralympic medal.
'We call it ‘Tim’s Maternity Leave’,' jokes Angle, as he talks about this final stretch of training before the Paralympic Games. As of May 1, he will focus full time on sailing.
For the 2004 Games, Angle and Doerr, racing then with crew Maureen McKinnon-Tucker, finished third at the U.S. Paralympic Team Trials. But their track record during the current quadrennium—with crew Bill Donohue rounding out the trio—built a different kind of promise. On the eve of the U.S. Trials, they won the IFDS Sailing World Championship; a month later, they triumphed in a close battle at the U.S. Trials in Rhode Island.
Angle’s heritage is closely knit to the sport, and his family tree includes several generations of sailors. Angle’s father was, 'the reason I became a sailor,' he says. His father took him sailing when he was two weeks old; by age eight, Angle was skippering his own boat. Junior racing lead to sailing at Marblehead High School. But as a college freshman, Angle lost his arm to bacterial meningitis and took time off from school.
When he returned to school, he gravitated to the sailing team. He rigged a dinghy so he could steer the boat with his feet—but Angle admits it wasn’t a fast way to sail. He started coaching the team and deepened his education as a sailor. Racing a Sonar against disabled and able-bodied sailors has been his home in competitive sailing for seven years.
Patience, Angle believes, is a survival tool for someone with a disability: 'You have a problem, and you have to be patient; you have to figure out how to solve it, for the next time.'
Success in sailing, he believes, is also tied to patience. Coaches Peter Wilson and Betsy Alison have ingrained that value into the minds of this team, teaching them to gamble intelligently on the racecourse—to not take long-shot chances but to be patient and take calculated risks that can pay off at the finish line.
But in another sense, Angle feels he and his teammates have waited long enough: 'We’ve been patient for seven years,' he says. 'Now, it’s our turn to represent our country.'
click here
Bill Donohue
CLASS: Sonar
POSITION: Crew
US DISABLED SAILING TEAM ALPHAGRAPHICS: 2006-2008
MEMBER OF: Shore Acres Yacht Club
HIGH SCHOOL: Scotch Plains High School
COLLEGE: Union College (completed two years)
AGE DURING PARALYMPICS: 56
BIRTHPLACE: Newark, New Jersey
HOMETOWN: Brick, New Jersey
OCCUPATION: Yacht broker
SAILING SINCE AGE: 7
Sailing and the water have long been a focus of Bill Donohue's life. He started sailing at age 7; by the time he was 8, he was racing a Penguin, a doublehanded dinghy popular with junior sailors on the New Jersey shore where he grew up. Penguin racing in that era on Barnegat Bay was nurturing an entire fleet of hot sailors—including America's Cup racers like Gary Jobson and Bill Campbell.
When Donohue talks about the path his life took after his early Penguin days, he talks about each chapter in terms of the boats he sailed: the Flying Scot of his late teens, Comets and Lightnings, and the larger racing keelboats sailed under a handicap-rule system of his early adulthood.
At age 18, Donohue was disabled in a car accident, and his leg was amputated when he was in his 40s. 'But I never stopped sailing,' he says. As a disabled person, sailing was the one sport from his youth that Donohue could stay active in—and he gives you a clear sense that his ability to keep sailing was not only about winning more races: 'Sailing,' he says, 'was my salvation.'
These days, you will find Donohue as crew onboard a triplehanded Sonar and spending time on the water with a global ambition: to win a medal at the Paralympic Games in Qingdao. In the summer of 2006, he was introduced to Rick Doerr, a fellow New Jersey sailor and a veteran campaigner in Paralympic circles. Doerr was looking for crew; when Donohue agreed to come on board, a new arena in the sport he loved opened up.
For Donohue, Doerr, and third crew Tim Angle, medal-level finishes in the Sonar class became the norm in 2006. In 2007, this crew won the IFDS Disabled Sailing World Championship and the U.S. Paralympic Team Trials; that same year, they were named by the U.S. Olympic Committee the Paralympians of the Year for Sailing.
When Donohue talks about making a transition to the Paralympic arena, his biggest challenge wasn't adjusting to a new boat. His biggest challenge was switching from the role of skipper to crew. 'I try not to be a backseat driver,' he jokes.
Donohue sees his team to be a strong one, with each player bringing an impressive sailing background to this Sonar campaign. But when Donohue gets onboard, what he brings with him are all his years of sailing, in all different kinds of boats. That kind of experience helps both in the moves this crew makes together on the racecourse, and in the mental aspects of how the game is played.
It's that mental aspect of sailing that drew Donohue into the sport and kept him there as he adjusted to life as a disabled person. And it is what he loves most about racing sailboats, 'the fact,' he says, 'that you can compete against people using your head—rather than your physical abilities.'
Complete profile click here
More information at www.ussailing.org
by US Sailing
11:49 PM Wed 3 Sep 2008 GMT
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