Hans La Cour Andersen

22 February 2009. Dear friends, sorry to send you a mass email like this but I have a piece of bad news which unfortunately I have to share with you. A few weeks ago I went to a doctor because I noticed a lump…

So began the journey for 54 year old Hans, his friends, colleagues and family – a journey that would end at the wrong destination.

Martin Tasker, the yachting correspondent for TVNZ has worked a lot with Hans since his arrival in New Zealand from Denmark in the early 1990’s – an adventure in itself, one during which Hans met his Chilean wife Leila,  and led to his book Den Rejsende (The traveller).

It wasn’t his only book, he wrote Kampen Om America’s Cup (The Battle about the America’s Cup).

Tasker reminisces about the cup campaigns they covered together until it all went belly up thanks to New Zealand’s inglorious defeat.

“That’s when I got to really know him I guess, we became really good mates from there,” he recalls.

“Working in the broadcasting world you often don’t see people for a long time.  But then you just pick up where you left off cause you’ve worked so closely together.

“If you do work that closely together and you are still talking to each other it means you’re good mates, ” laughs Tasker before turning serious again, “he was a special man and I am going to miss him enormously.”

It was the cup experiences which led Hans, a passionate sailor himself, to become one of the world’s most sought after yachting cameramen, covering regattas all over the world, more often than not from his base in Denmark.

Tasker vividly remembers the shoots. “We worked crazy hours. He pioneered a system where we could edit on the computer off the XDCAM camera for an FTP transfer.  Out of Marseilles it was taking hours to feed a few minutes of material and the line would keep going down so he’d have to start again. Half the time he slept under his desk in the media centre to make sure it would go through.”

The pair worked together in New Zealand, Australia, Korea, Sweden, Spain, France and China where Tasker recalls Hans more or less master-minding the live coverage of the Beijing Olympic sailing.

“He pulled together a team at the last minute for the American broadcasters, and he was the lead camera.

“The coverage won a Golden Rings, the highest Olympic Television Award,” he notes, “it was a huge irony to us because the equipment they gave us was appalling!”

“One night we were working at about one thirty in a Portacabin on top of team New Zealand’s building. We were trying to put together an FTP feed and we needed shots from the host broadcaster’s cameras. Hans was using an XDCAM disc but it was on tape,” Tasker explains.

“I went to the equipment store and nicked a camera, climbed back up all the steps again, and the bloody thing wouldn’t work.”

“By that stage I would have just chucked it in the sea in a rage. But Hans calmly went out of what he was doing on his computers, went into the manufacturer’s web site pulled up the workshop manual for that camera, mended it and carried on. My jaw just dropped.”

“That typified him – here’s a solution, you’ve only got to use your brain.”

“He would never stop,” Tasker adds, “but he had a huge capacity for enjoying himself.”

He says Hans was a kind of renaissance man who spoke eight languages, reading and writing most of them fluently, he was a producer, director, pianist, guitarist, author – and not just of sports stuff but heavy hitting political stuff as well.

“Before he got sick he was working on a political film about Amazonian political prisoners and how they are being abused, it was an environmental fight and involved them in some dangerous stuff like sneaking film out of prisons. He showed me the promo they had done to raise money, it was one of the last things we did shortly before I left Demark a few weeks ago.”

It was that last trip to Denmark that reminded Martin how important being a Dad was to Hans.

“When I was up there last month Leila picked me up from the station and Hans came out of Hospital so he could have dinner with the family.

“The following day Leila and I were just talking – she was very upset she was saying it was their teenage twins, Nils and Nadine she felt sorry for.”

“I said you’ve got to remember that your kids are mature way beyond their years, thanks to you and Hans. They have done more with their Dad than most kids would do in a whole lifetime. They went sailing, all these other adventures, they’ve lived in all these different countries they speak in all these different languages, they play all these instruments they are lovely beautiful rounded people and he’s left them with the world as their oyster.”

October 23rd, 2009, 9:21 am by simard. Hans sadly passed away yesterday in Denmark. Details are sketchy. We know that he had a good fight with liver cancer in which we all thought he had beaten.

Hans was a truly great man, a visionary and amazing entrepreneur. He was considered one of the top sailing cameraman worldwide and worked on many America’s Cups, Olympics and Volvo sailing regattas. He was one of the big supporter of NZCREWS and was instrumental in setting it up.

This is an absolute tragedy. He will be sadly missed.