Maureen McKinnon-Tucker still remembers her first quality time spent back in a sailboat after a debilitating accident left her a paraplegic.
The Marblehead, Mass. Resident was injured on a beautiful summer night in 2001 when she tripped and fell 13 feet over the side of a retaining wall. She landed on a strip of rocky beach in Maine, breaking her back.
Returning to the water six years later, she and two friends took out a Sonar on Marblehead Harbor. She was operating the jib when it dawned on her: finally, she could be an "equal partner" on a crew, despite her disability.
McKinnon-Tucker and skipper Nick Scandone comprise a two-man SCUD 18 team."Having a disability is a very disempowering experience," says McKinnon-Tucker. "You lose bits and piece of your life, what you identify yourself with and how you identify yourself"¦Sailing was one of the puzzle pieces of my life I got back."
After that happy return to the water, McKinnon-Tucker began sailing competitively in disabled sailing events, eventually becoming the first woman to make the U.S. disabled sailing team in 2001.
This September she will represent the United States at the 2008 Paralympic games in Beijing. She now hopes to become the first female disabled sailor to win a gold medal for the U.S.
"It's cool, but it's also a heavy responsibility," she says.
She still plans on attending the games despite the fact that her son, Trent, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in February. He is now cancer free, she reports, but he will have to have some follow up radiation therapy.
THE SCUD 18 TEAM
McKinnon-Tucker will be the trimmer – managing 11 lines controls that require her to be strong and fit – on a two-person SCUD 18 team with skipper Nick Scandone.
Scandone is a Fountain Valley, Calif. resident who suffers from ALS, the debilitating nerve disease known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Along with the mobility challenges all disabled sailors face, the pair also must continually make modifications to their boat in order to accommodate Scandone's disease, which worsens as time goes on. He may even be on a ventilator by the time of the games.
The pair qualified for the Olympics after a nine-day race in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. The Paralympic sailing event will be in Qingdao, a coastal city about 430 mile east of Beijing in September. It's the same spot where the Olympic sailing events will be held one month earlier.
McKinnon-Tucker is married to a fellow sailor and Internet consultant, Daniel Tucker, and is the mother of two children, Dana, 7 and Trent, 2.
When she's not busy being a mom or campaigning for an Olympic medal, she works as an adaptive sailing coordinator at the Piers Park Sailing Center in East Boston. She said she finds it gratifying to work with kids from the inner city with disabilities – many of them who have been turned away from traditional recreational programs like soccer or baseball.
"It's very satisfying to have a non-sailor come and sign up for the program and learn something empowering that they were never expected to do," McKinnon-Tucker says. "One of my sailors said what she loved most about sailing was that she is in charge and she feels alive again. Well, I sure do. A lot of the sailors say they can leave their wheelchairs or crutches or walkers and leave them on the dock and sail away. It's the perfect sport for someone who has to sit down."
