Hong Kong — Déjà Vu All Over Again

After a hiatus of many years, The Canadians are goin' back ... to race dragon boats in a major DB event in Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour.

You may have heard stories of – or even been a part of – those fabled FCRCC Women's crews that so astonished the DB racing community, as they won race after race after race in Hong Kong, 20-odd years ago.

At the time, although "international races" had been held in Hong Kong starting in 1976, there really wasn't much in the way of DB racing outside of its ancient homeland in the Chinas.  When the FCRCC Women first went to race there, it was only a few years after the start of DB racing in North America (1985 in New York and then at Expo 86 right here on the Creek).  The IDBF didn't even get founded until 1991.

So the arrival at the de-facto world championships in Hong Kong of a crew of women from The Great White North ... and then them winning, was quite the surprise.

In fact, the FCRCC Women are still the record-time holders for this length of race course (it's the traditional 640 metres) in Hong Kong!

And so, it's highly appropriate that four FCRCC crews are the ones taking up that best-there-is torch, and going back to the same place where the FCRCC Women's legend began ...

The crews making up Team Canada are:

• FCRCC Mixed & FCRCC Women, coached by Kamini Jain
• FCRCC Open & FCRCC Canadian Jambalya, coached by Brad Howie & Jackie Webber

The Mixed crew are all from the FCRCC High Performance DB Program.  The Women are mostly from HP, with some strong women from Dragon Hearts Magnum coming a'board.  Open & Jambalaya crews are from Dragon Hearts Magnum, Masters of D'Zone and HP.

All four crews have received significant & generous sponsorship from HSBC Canada, and the Hong Kong Tourism Board.

This is a big event!  The media sheet says there's 191 DB teams entered, 30 of which are international – from Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan and the USA; the 161 local teams are from Hong Kong, Macau and China.  Imagine the RTA DB Festival with 191 teams, doing 640m races ... it would need 3+ days dawn to dusk, & the Racer's Village would go all the way to the Expo Plaza!

More details, including several related web links, can be found on the HP site, and in a thread on DB West.  The latter will be the place to watch for updates, news, etc. – Puppy's one of the (or perhaps the) primary movers behind this effort, so he'll no doubt be posting updates on the fly while in HK.

The crews are heading to HK the weekend of July 17th, or early the following week.  The event runs July 23rd thru 25th.

All the crew & coaches are stoked for this, rarin' to go ... and wearing big smiles, despite the etxra (& extra hard!) practices the coaches laid on once this effort got rolling.

Wish 'em well!

Go Canada Go!

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