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LONDON — A 50-year-old wheelchair-bound former U.S. marine and three teammates have become the first women to row nonstop around mainland Britain after completing the 2,000-mile journey.
Amateur rowers Belinda Kirk, Laura Thomasson, Beverley Ashton and Angela Madsen reached London's Tower Bridge on July 23 to finish the trip in 51 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes.
Madsen (pictured) is a wheelchair-bound former U.S. marine from Long Beach, Calif. She has rowed the Atlantic and Indian oceans but says Britain "presented the most challenging and unpredictable weather patterns."
The 50-year-old grandmother broke her finger setting off a flare but carried on with a strapped hand.
The quartet started the race against a men's team June 1, but the men gave up after less than two weeks.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From The AP:
