Over 2,000 years ago in southern China, Qu Yuan drowned himself to protest against a corrupt government. Villagers took to the water in whatever craft they could and threw rice to prevent fish from eating his body, or so legend has it. Now, the desperate paddle has evolved into a sport athletes train for year round.
With furious starts, dramatic upsets, and overwhelming fatigue- and all in under two-anda- half minutes-dragon boat racing is made for sports fans with short attention spans. Because the races consist of brief sprints, regattas pack in lots of teams and divisions.
“There’s divisions for everyone,” explained Sam Tirgari, UC’s newly graduated coach. “You’re not gonna pit the breast cancer survivors against the bulky men.”
It might not sit so well with Qu Yuan, and it certainly irks some modern competitors, but dragon boat races are also big business.
The Toronto International Dragon Boat Festival, according to organizers at the Toronto Chinese Business Association, brought over 125,000 people to Centre Island this year. An explicit goal of the festival is “to promote the goodwill of corporate sponsors with the ethnic communities,” and five of the eight objectives on the official web site are devoted to promoting business and tourism. And the festival clearly reached these goals: the beach was dotted with corporate sponsors who had set up booths and funded teams.
Karen Chung, captain of Vi- Crew, was on the fence about the corporate presence. She allowed that some funded teams weren’t very good, but wished that those attaching their names to a boat would actually paddle it.
“Some teams who have corporate funding don’t necessarily have employees on a team,” she complained.
Still, she admitted that the teams were lucky to have fnancial backers.
New College co-captain Tim Sze, estimating the yearly cost of running a team at $12,000 to $13,000, sees sponsorship as necessary. Competition fees, travelling expenses, boat rentals, jerseys and other costs add up quickly, especially for students. The cost to individual paddlers vary, depending on the amount of funding a team receives from UTSU and their college and alumni associations, but one way or another, a team pays its way.
Coaches, who can command up to $90 per practice session, are hired based on reputation rather than certification. And even “professional” coaches have day jobs.
UC’s coach, Rob Cheng, works as a financial analyst. Cheng paddled for the UTSC Piranhas before he came to the Water Dragons in what UC captain Nick Miladinovic called “a charity move.”
U of T crews earned high honours this year, sweeping the University division at the Centre Island festival on June 16 and 17. But for the first time in four years, the UC Water Dragons won’t be attending the International College Dragon Boat Championships in Tianjin, China.
The team relied on Dr. Howard Chen, a California philanthropist who secured subsidies from the Chinese government, to fund their travel and stay. This year, says UC captain Nick Miladinovic, bad organization- and poor funding- have limited the number of international teams who could make the trip.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to travel to compete with mostly local teams,” he added.
Ongoing talks aim to create a world university championship, probably in California, but that will take at least a couple of years. For now, international university-level dragon boating is at a standstill.
But competitors insist it’s not dead in the water.
“It’s absolutely a growing sport,” said Miladinovic. “In terms of that level of competition, it’s still in its infancy, so trying to organize a large-scale international competition for university teams is something really difficult to do.”
A bid to add the sport to the Olympics may be in the works a few years from now. In April, the International Dragon Boat Federation (IDBF) was accepted as a full member to the General Association of International Sport Federations. Recognition of the sport by the International Olympic Committee requires the IDBF to have at least 75 member countries, 17 more than the current dragonboating total of 58.
