Eye of the Dragon

By Analee Weinberger

Vancouver played host to the 1996 World Championship Dragon Boat Festival in June, an international competition featuring over 100 local teams as well as crews from New Zealand, Germany, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, the U.S. and Australia.

While Vancouver’s Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival has always been a popular event (in 1995, it attracted over 100,000 spectators in three days), this year is notable as the first time a world championship race has been held outside of Asia.

One local team making headlines is Eye of the Dragon. It is the only dragon boat team in North America that fields a mixed crew of paddlers who are blind, have low vision or are sighted. For the third year in a row, this unique team has competed in the novice division on an equal footing with sighted peers. This year, they placed in the top half of their division.

Although dragon boat racing is just beginning to catch on as a popular sport and recreational activity in North America, it has a colourful history that goes back over 2,000 years to China in the third century B.C.

According to popular legend, the exiled poet and patriot Qu Yuan decided to take his own life by drowning himself in the river after hearing of his home province’s defeat in battle. When the local fishermen learned of his intentions, hundreds of them raced out in their boats hoping to save him, all the while splashing their paddles and beating drums to keep the water dragons away from him. From this event evolved the yearly Festival of the Double Fifth, which included not only dragon boat races but fertility rites and even human sacrifice.

While Vancouver’s festival has retained much of the ceremony and ritual of the past (without the more macabre traditions), it has also become a celebration of diversity and multiculturalism. Taoist priests bless the boats at the opening ceremonies; craftspeople and performers from various countries and cultural communities participate in the event; and a food court representing a wide variety of ethnic cuisine is set up for the spectators and racers. (The race site, washroom facilities and buildings are all wheelchair accessible.)

The races take place over a course 650 metres long, and last approximately three minutes. These dragon boats are actually elaborately decorated long canoes that accommodate a crew of 20 paddlers, a steersperson and a drummer. The objective of the racers is to maintain perfect timing during the course of the race while using the various paddling strokes that will get the heavy boat moving from a dead standstill to race speed most effectively, across the finish line.

One of the reasons for the sport’s growing popularity is its accessibility to people who are not otherwise very athletic. The basic technique is simple to learn, and good timing and technique more than physical strength are what distinguish a successful team. Throw in the strong social element and the excitement of the festival, and dragon boat racing becomes an attractive recreational activity for a wide variety of people. At the Vancouver festival, teams have a choice of three divisions in which they can compete, depending on their level of ability and amount of training: novice, recreational and competitive.

Eye of the Dragon brings together a strikingly diverse group of people in terms of age, athletic ability and reasons for joining the team. Some members have been involved in other competitive sports, like Patrick York, who competed as a cyclist in Barcelona in 1992. Patrick was the first dragon boat paddler to be totally blind when he joined Concord Pacific Development’s Flying Dragons in 1993. Thilo von Rodhkirch, who has guided vision, has also been cross-country skiing for the past four years and has taught martial arts.

A number of the more athletically inclined members from previous years were not available to paddle this season because they are training for the upcoming Paralympics.

For other team members, this is their only recreational sport activity. Chek Tay, a sighted paddler, learned of the team from his niece, Evelyn, who was already a member. He thought it would be a good way to get back into shape, and discovered that he really enjoyed the social aspect of it as well as the team spirit. (In a sport that’s known for its camaraderie among competitors, Eye of the Dragon has a reputation as an outgoing team with a lot of spirit and a positive attitude.) Chek says that an unexpected benefit of his participation in the biweekly practices, which began in late February, has been a new awareness of the abilities of individuals who are blind or have low vision.

Paddling is also a family affair for team captain/treasurer/secretary Dianna Johnston, who works as the executive assistant at the Vancouver office of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Like the other team members, she wasn’t familiar with the sport of dragon boat racing until she was approached to join the team and recruit other members. "I went home one day and asked [my husband] Jim, ’Do you want to paddle a dragon boat?’ and he said, What the hell’s a dragon boat?’ and I said, ’Well, we’ll find out...’" Dianna’s mother, referred to by the team as "Granny Barb," joined the following year.

The driving force behind Eye of the Dragon is their charismatic team manager, Elizabeth Nash, affectionately known as the "Dragonlady." Ms. Nash, who is the mother of two dragon boat paddlers and also has a visual disability, saw a rare opportunity for people with visual disabilities to compete in a sport on equal footing with sighted athletes. The creation of a team became a project of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind’s Communications Committee, of which Ms. Nash was a member. Patrick York joined the Flying Dragons as a result of her challenge to local teams in 1993 to take on a paddler who was blind.

In 1994, enough people had been recruited to put together a full team. To cover the costs of registration, Ms. Nash established the Stephen Nash Memorial Fund in memory of her son, who went missing and was presumed drowned a number of years ago. Concord Pacific provided the team with the use of its boat for training, eliminating the need to pay for practices.

Initially, one of the purposes of the team was to improve public awareness of the abilities of individuals with visual disabilities by having the team compete successfully in a "sighted" sport. At the closing ceremonies of the 1994 festival, the team challenged the international dragon boat community to create more teams of paddlers who are blind or have low vision (To date, there appears to be no other such team in existence). And, at the closing ceremonies in 1995, Eye of the Dragon won the David Lam Award for the "team which best exemplifies community service, dedication and the multicultural spirit of the festival."

Today, Eye of the Dragon would like to be considered as just a team like any other, rather than "the blind team." It is no longer affiliated with the CNIB, although it is a sanctioned program of the B.C. Blind Sports and Recreation Association. The team chooses to raise most of its own funds through events such as its annual Dart-a-thon ("which is particularly fun for paddlers who are blind," says Thilo). Team members are unanimous in stating that they don’t face many special challenges as paddlers with visual disabilities.

Richard Marion, a paddler with a visual disability in his second season with the team, likes the fact that no modifications are needed in order for his team to compete -- "Out on the water, we’re equal." However, there is one area in which Eye of the Dragon does things a little differently. All teams have a drummer at the front of the boat who beats to the rhythm of the front two paddlers, or "strokes," during the races. Most crews rely on the visual cue of the movements of the strokes’ upper arms to maintain the perfect timing needed to keep the boat surging forward. In this case, some of the paddlers must rely exclusively on the rhythm of the drum. Richard says that paddlers who have been doing it for a while get a feel for the boat and know the timing from its movements.

Ironically, this one difference has resulted in the team’s only minor public relations issue. There are no drums in the practice boats, so the drummer bangs a paddle on the centreboard for timing. The team practises in False Creek, an inlet lined with apartments, condominiums and houseboats, and they have been yelled at by some of the residents, who object to the noise level coming from Eye of the Dragon’s boat.

"Once we explain what we’re doing, people are okay about it," says Dianna Johnston. The only other challenge she identifies is in teaching the paddling stroke to new members with visual disabilities. Depending on the degree of disability, this can take a little more time than it would for people who can learn by watching the movements of experienced paddlers. During training, sighted team members assist those who need help in following the cues of the warm-up leader or who need to work on their technique. As is the case for all teams, almost all of coach Kim Graham’s cues are verbal once the boat is out on the water.

Now that the team has a few seasons under its belt, the goal for next year is to improve the physical fitness levels and technical abilities of its paddlers in order to compete even more successfully. They would also like to be able to compete in some of the out-of-town festivals, which would require more fundraising in the next seasons. (Eye of the Dragon competed in the Victoria, B.C., races last summer.)

The team received good news on the last day of the festival, when the B.C. Blind Sports and Recreation Association announced that it would begin fundraising in order to buy the team its own dragon boat, so that they will no longer have to rely on the generosity of other teams for their practices.

Since its introduction to North America in Vancouver in 1986, dragon boat festivals have sprung up in Victoria, Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal as well as in cities across the United States, offering opportunities for new teams to participate in a unique and exciting recreational sport. This year, in Vancouver, Abreast in a Boat became the first team in competition made up of paddlers who had survived breast cancer. They cited Eye of the Dragon as an inspiration. Dianna has also been contacted by a group that is working on a team of paddlers who are deaf.

The International Dragon Boat Federation is working toward having the sport recognized as an Olympic event, which might offer yet another unique opportunity for paddlers with visual disabilities who are interested in competing seriously.

Elizabeth Nash’s original challenge to other communities to put together more teams of paddlers who are blind or have low vision still stands. And with the increasing number of dragon boat festivals available in which to participate, that goal should be more accessible than ever. "Paddles up!" (a paddlers’ greeting taken from the command given to paddlers when a race is about to begin).

(Analee Weinberger is a freelance writer and a paddler with Team Tiger Balm-Glico, a Vancouver-based team that competes in the recreational division.)