I Gusti Made Oka Sulaksana, from Sanur, Bali, was recently awarded Indonesia’s Top Male Athlete of the Year. He has successfully competed in various local and international windsurfing events for well over a decade, and now stands right on the verge of fulfilling his greatest dream: winning gold at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. By Jero Kartini.

Born in Sanur on the 29th of April 1971, and having grown up by the beach as a fisherman’s son, Oka Sulaksana was only one year old when his father started taking him out to sea in their Jukung (a traditional Balinese fishing boat). At the age of seven, Oka had already started surfing the waves off the Sanur Reef along with other young people from Sanur. As he grew older, he accompanied his father sailing and fishing.

When he was just 13 Oka saw a tourist windsurfing, which probably marked the beginning of his later success. He knew right away that he wanted to try riding one these "boards with a sail" - the perfect way to combine surfing and sailing. He just had to do it!

Oka eventually managed to borrow a surfboard from a tourist and tried windsurfing for the first time. Later he borrowed boards from the Bali Dive Center in Sanur, but eventually all those boards broke. He was then forced to use the leftover pieces to put together his own "do-it-yourself" board to continue exploring the wind and waves. A still intact old board served as the base, and he simply used a piece of bamboo cut to the right length for the mast. A forked branch from a Waro Tree on the beach was improvised as a wishbone for the sail.

Early success
It was on the same homemade board that Oka Sulaksana first became involved in competing, and his first event was the Second Bali Open in 1984. Although he scored last by along way, he was able to buy a fully battened sail from one of the other competitors, which finally allowed him to learn how to windsurfing properly.

At the Bali Open competition in 1985, Oka Sulaksana won his first contest on an old, rundown practice board, which he was able to borrow from another competitor who came down from Jakarta. He also won the 1986 Bali Open, this time on a board that was given to him by a company in Jakarta. At the same event he won a trip to compete in the Singapore Open, which was donated by the Segara Beach Village in Sanur.

Singapore was Oka’s first overseas competition, where he was placed second at the age of just 16. After Singapore he placed first again at the 1987 Bali Open, and then travelled to France to compete in the Word Open Sailboard Titles, quite unprepared. Exposed to weather and wind conditions he had never experienced before, he was nevertheless placed 20th out of a field of 150 competitors.

Sulaksana began an association with Mistral in 1988, when he was invited to participate in the International Mistral Competition Organization (IMCO) Australian Championships, where he placed 9th. The following year he placed 3rd in the Indonesian Team at the South East Asian (SEA) Games in Malaysia, and then started competing throughout Asia, where he won every event he entered.

Unstoppable
In 1993 Oka’s bright career looked as though it was about to come to an end, when he was hit by an out-of-control Jet Ski while lying on Sanur Beach, leaving him with a fractured skull. After three days in a coma, Oka spent six months in hospital recovering from his injuries. As soon as he was released from hospital, however, he immediately picked up on his training, and had returned to competition sailing by 1994. He won both the Thailand and the Singapore Open competitions of that year, and in 1995 he won another Gold Medal at the SEA-Games in Thailand, which led to the Atlanta Olympics.

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