New Documentary Tells the Story of Champion Paraplegic Rower Angela Madsen
By Terry Galvin
Thanks to a new documentary, we can know intimately the story of four-time World Rowing Championship medalist and ocean rower Angela Madsen, a paraplegic who celebrated her 60th birthday while trying to row alone across the Pacific. Madsen died during the 2020 attempt when she was nearly halfway to Honolulu.
The 82-minute film Row of Life, which premiered June 19, was made because Madsen, an American and Marine Corps veteran, asked Soraya Simi to make a record of the effort, Madsen’s second solo trans-Pacific attempt. Simi at the time was 24 and had graduated from the USC film school the year before.
But what Simi directed in her first feature documentary is a polished, beautifully shot and edited work. It premiered at the Downtown Community Television Center’s Firehouse Cinema in New York City, an official Academy Award-qualifying theater.
Among the 10 people who came on board as executive producers for the film is Sue Bird, who formed woman-focused media companies after retiring from three decades in the WNBA.
As the Covid pandemic spiked in 2020, Simi became a part of Madsen’s support team, which consisted almost solely of Madsen’s wife, Deb Madsen. According to the film, Madsen’s weather team was an LA television news meteorologist who took an interest in the effort.
Simi is in front of the camera only a few times. She helped Deb Madsen contact the Coast Guard when Angela stopped responding to texts and calls. She also led the camera crew to the Marshall Islands after they heard that Madsen’s 20-foot boat had washed up on an atoll there months after a German cargo ship had been diverted to recover her body.
The film is an unsparing look at a woman with a matter-of-fact approach to challenges that was shaped by hardships overcome by toughness and drive.
Madsen looks at the camera in a pre-departure interview, her face and shoulders barely fitting in the frame, when she says, “Someone once told me I was born with a resilient trait and I said, ‘No, I’ve just had more opportunity to practice than other people have.’
“It’s a capability we share, as humans — to be capable.”
The first words heard in the film are Madsen’s, spoken in voice-over of an aerial shot of her quietly rowing her ocean boat across the screen.
“I’ve had a vision of getting to the finish line — I get to claim victory, and it’s documented.”
Simi has made sure at least part of that dream came true.
Near the end of the film, Deb Madsen and Angela Madsen’s grand daughters are on a sailboat carrying a box of Angela’s ashes into Honolulu Harbor, the planned destination of her epic row.
Biographies can drag as slowly as a trans-ocean row crawls across the map. But this film deftly intercuts background and key information among more dramatic developments in the Pacific crossing.
Archival footage recounts Madsen’s rows with teammates twice crossing the Atlantic, once crossing the Indian Ocean, and circumnavigating Great Britain. Interviews with veteran ocean rowers Chris Martin, Roz Savage and, later, Cyril Derreumaux, put the endeavor in context. Video clips quickly summarize Madsen’s achievements as a para-athlete and the increased “level of difficulty” caused by being dependent on others and a device.
Simi sets up Madsen’s boat to make her “an autonomous filmer.” Video she uploaded via satellite shows sometimes shaky shots of a passing whale, a sea turtle, a ship, a moonlight trail of reflection to the horizon. She takes off her top at one point, complaining that she gets rashes because of the scars left when she lost both breasts to cancer in 2002.
Savage explains that a parachute drogue anchor is used in storms to hold the boat bow into the waves when seas are high, information that become deadly relevant later.
Madsen is shown training on an erg in the middle of the night because the rods in her back cause pain and interrupt her sleep; packing; and being launched at night from a trailer at a boat ramp to begin her voyage.
Video graphics show her course on a map and recreate text conversations between Madsen and her wife. We see episodes of her video log, including night-vision video, and show her enduring a fierce storm that initially pushes her off course and threatens to crash her boat into Guadeloupe Island off Mexico. She tells the video blog that the boat was rolled twice by waves and she had to go on deck to secure parts that might get washed away.
Madsen voiceovers during the storm relate the story of her injury during a Marine Corps women’s basketball team practice, the operation that put her permanently in a wheelchair in 1993, her being abandoned by her live-in girlfriend and evicted when she was released from three months in the hospital because of the botched operation, and becoming homeless and suicidal before changing her life.
“I learned how to stop being adrift and angry, and learned how to navigate,” she says to the camera.
In addition to winning a silver medal in the single at the first ever international event for adaptive rowing, the 2002 World Rowing Championships, she won World Rowing gold three times in the double with fellow American Scott Brown. She and Brown represented the U.S. in the first appearance of adaptive rowing at the Paralympic Games, in Beijing in 2008. She also won a bronze medal in the shot put at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London.
Madsen and Helen Taylor of the U.K. in 2009 were the first women to row across the Indian Ocean, doing so in a team of eight. She was part of two teams that rowed across the Atlantic. In 2014, she and Tara Remington of New Zealand rowed from Long Beach, Calif., to Honolulu. In 2013, her first attempt to row solo from California to Hawaii ended by being hoisted into a Coast Guard helicopter after only nine days because of heavy seas. That time, her boat was thought lost until a fishing boat spotted it and returned it to her.
She was a 14-time Guinness World Record holder.
She wrote a memoir, Rowing Against the Wind, published in 2014. She also was the subject of one in a series of half-hour AT&T Original Documentaries.
USRowing posthumously awarded her the 2022 Isabel Bohn Award for “achieving measurable success in expanding rowing opportunities for those with physical and intellectual disabilities.”
She received the Athletes in Excellence Award from The Foundation for Global Sports Development in recognition of her community service efforts and work with young people, including founding the California Adaptive Rowing Program.
After seven days of showings at Firehouse Cinema, Row of Life will be shown at select theaters. It has no distribution or streaming deal yet.
A screening and a following panel discussion will be held June 27 at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif., in conjunction with Angel City Sports’ 11th annual Angel City Games.
Angel City Sports, which promotes adaptive sports and mentors athletes, will hand out the Angela Madsen Courage Award, which honors a veteran or first responder who embodies Madsen’s life and legacy. Madsen coached rowing, shot put and javelin athletes for Angel City Sports from its founding in 2013.
More information on the film is available online.
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