Long before Marcello Burricks was born, South Africa’s apartheid police swept his mother and her family from their home in Simon’s Town, a period-piece village on the Cape of Good Hope, and dispatched them to an impoverished ghetto called Slangkop, or Snakehead. Their sin was being of mixed race in a place reserved for whites. Slangkop is where Marcello grew up, where his parents separated and where he hung with gangs and watched men die on the streets. When he was 8 a classmate stabbed him. When he was 14 he was arrested for beating a high-school teacher.

Today, 19-year-old Marcello Burricks helps trim the mainsail on a 25meter racing yacht in this city’s stunning Table Bay. The only people he wants to beat are Larry Ellison, Ernesto Bertarelli and a host of other billionaires in the next America’s Cup.

In South Africa, Yachting Erases a Racial Barrier

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2005 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Team Shosholoza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.