Outrigger Champion: How Danny Ching conquered Molokai
by Mark McDermott Five years had passed since the last Kaiwi Solo, the world championship of outrigger canoeing. The race had been canceled in 2019 by one of the treacherous storms that often haunt the channel, a tumultuous body of water between the Molokai and Oahu islands, which translated from Hawaiian means “the channel of bones.” The pandemic wiped out the next three years until finally, the race resumed on May 16. Danny Ching didn’t know what to expect. He’d won the race twice previously. In 2010, Ching was the first competitor not from Hawaii or elsewhere in the Pacific islands to win the championship. He’d last won the race in 2013. But 10 years is a long time, and five years between races is in some ways an even longer time for an athlete. And then there was this: Ching would turn 40 on the day of the race. “I was under the impression I had a chance,” Ching said. “But the issue we ran into is they haven’t held this race since 2018…. So racing all these people, it’s kind of interesting, because we’re all training in our own little area, and normally you have times during the year we get exposure to each other — we race and you get to kind of calibrate everyone’s speed and…
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