New SBS sailing documentary Disable Bodied Sailors starts March 18
by Lizzy Kingston on 5 Mar 2010
David Pescud and the crew of SwD yacht as featured in the SBS documentary Disable Bodied Sailors Oxford Scientific Films
As extraordinary enterprises go this is up there. A group of people who are variously blind, limbless and paraplegic are about to take part in the world's toughest ocean race, the Sydney to Hobart.
Disable Bodied Sailors is a new four part series for SBS that follows the tough talking, no nonsense skipper David Pescud (one part old man of the sea, one part blunt instrument) and his core team as they find a crew, train a crew and then race a crew, comprised of men and women with disabilities.
Pescud, a veteran of seventeen Sydney to Hobart races, is the founder of the organisation Sailors with disAbilities (SwD). This year he set himself an extraordinary task: to fill key missing positions on his boat with new crew members who have never sailed before AND are disabled. We follow David and the new recruits as they are pushed to the limit in training through storms and swells. They have just 12 weeks to prepare for a race which is the nautical equivalent of climbing Everest.
Sailing is the only sport which doesn't have a special category for the disabled, and David and the SwD crew have won the Sydney to Hobart twice in their division against fully able crews.
'Sailing is the great equaliser. When the chips are down in the Sydney to Hobart, everyone's a cripple. In the pitch dark of a moonless night, everyone's blind. In a howling storm, everyone's deaf. When the boat's deck is riding at 90 degrees to the water no-one can walk, everyone scuttles around on their bum' says Pescud.
David's mission is not just to bring new disabled bodies to SwD – he wants the message to get out that disabled people are not to be taken for granted. And that disabled people themselves should never take their own potential for granted either.
Narrated by Erik Thomson, Disable Bodied Sailors is the incredible and inspirational journey of one skipper who is determined to get his crew first to Hobart, and the personal stories of the sailors who join him for the ride of their lives. It starts on Thurs, March 18 at 8.30pm on SBS ONE.
www.sbs.com.au/secretsandlives
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