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| Traditional dragon heads grace the front of boats. Mark Thomson |
Modern crews sign on for ancient Chinese dragon boat racing
With no jock hierarchy to discourage participants and a lot of colorful visual exposure via the Beijing Olympic festivities, this paddle sport is seeing a growth spurt in the US.
By Jenna Fisher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the June 20, 2008 edition
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Cambridge, Mass. - The first thing you might notice about the motley crew of men and women stretching out along the bank of the Charles River on a recent sultry Sunday afternoon is how different they look from one another. If they weren't lined up two-by-two in matching black-and-white racing shirts with the same logo, you might mistake them as contenders for America's Got Diversity, rather than a dragon-boat team busy making waves on the east coast racing circuit.
Yes, you read that right. Dragon-boat team.
These members of the Living Roots team – including a scrappy nuclear engineer, a studly but quiet Jamaican soccer player, a 15-year-old high school student, a pregnant health services executive, a scrawny grad student from India, and an unassuming young elementary schoolteacher – are going to pile into a couple of 40-foot long, 1,500-pound gondolalike canoes made of teak and fiberglass. The boats are tricked out with a dragon head and Chinese drum – about the size of a medium barrel – at the bow. At the stern is a platform for the steerer to command the rudder, while deftly avoiding harm to the dragon tail. (Yes, nautical purists, steerer is correct.)
At the sound of a horn they're going to dig and churn their way upstream – 20 people to a boat – aiming for 11 m.p.h. in the nautical equivalent of, say, drag racing souped-up classic cars.
Dragon-boat racing, which originated in ancient China, is a fast-growing sport – known for its democratic inclusion, both social and physical. If you can hold a paddle, you can be on a team. There's no jock hierarchy to exclude the skinny, the old, or the untrained.
An estimated 100,000 people in North America participate in races like today's Boston Dragon Boat Festival each year, according to the International Dragon Boat Federation.
This year about 3,000 teams are expected to compete in races in more than 100 US cities – that's a 20 percent increase over just two years ago. This year's Boston festival, for example, has 31 boats entered, up from 21 a year ago.
It's the walk-on appeal that's driving the growth of the sport, suggests Jay Coakley a sociologist who has written textbooks on sport and society. "The diversity of the teams is related to the fact that ... no credentials are needed, such as playing on a high school team ... taking lessons from so and so. It's democratic and inclusive by default – a refreshing thing for many of us."
He adds that part of the recent interest in the sport in the US has to do with Beijing. "The Olympics is shining a light on China and the complex and mixed scenes and stories we see and hear have attracted a great deal of attention and interest."
Photos of the Olympic torch being paddled across a river in China via dragon boat this spring especially charged paddlers says Sunny Lamm, coordinator of Montreal's annual International Dragon Boat Race Festival (July 26-27). "It's definitely, one of the fastest growing water sports in the world," says Mr. Lamm, who has been paddling and organizing races for a decade and is convinced the reason dragon-boat festivals have been popping up in more cities is that "it's a sport for anyone. We've had kids as young as 12 compete with 95-year-old breast cancer survivors. Really, anyone can learn it."
Dragon boating invites diversity.
• • •
Mike Chung, a buff transportation planner stands on the grassy bank of the Charles next to his paddling teammate antithesis, Karla Kasdan, just about the tiniest and the oldest member of Boston's Living Root club team.
"No one even batted an eyelash," says the platinum blond Ms. Kasdan of the day she presented her 4-feet 11-inch self at her first team practice a little over a year ago. Nor was the detail that she was old enough to be the mother of half the team an issue.
Living Root teammates are waiting for the officials to call them to their boats in Boston's 28th annual dragon-boat race – the oldest in the country. This is their first race after a long winter of practicing three times a week lined along the deck of a swimming pool, digging paddles from their perch and developing lopsided triceps on their favored side. And though not everyone on the team has arrived at today's mettle-proving event able to do crunches in time or are capable of perfect push-up form, the cohesiveness – and synchronization – of the team trumps all that.
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