Dragons to the rescue

MANILA, Philippines - The beauty of dragon boat racing, says Jung Valientes, team manager of the Manila Dragons, is that no one person can lay claim to the team’s success.

Any spectator of the sport can attest to this, for to make a 45-foot-long canoe slice water, all 22 people on board – paddlers, drummer, and steersman – must think and move as one. Watching a fleet of elaborate dragon boats fly across the bay in perfect synchronicity is nothing short of euphoric.

It is a 2,000-year-old sport that has quietly but surely gained a following in the 21st century among Filipinos from all walks of life. The Philippine Dragon Boat Federation (PDBF) lists no less than 20 dragon boat teams, including the Manila Dragons as well as corporate clubs, the Philippine Navy and Philippine National Police, and college teams. They organize or participate in local and international competitions, and the Philippine Team recently copped two golds and a silver medal in the 9th World Championship Dragon Boat Racing in Prague, Czech Republic.

Part of its draw is that it does not require great strength or swiftness from each individual, but rather focuses on technique and timing as an entire group. Age and gender are not discounting factors either; there are paddlers well into their 40s and 50s and there are mixed and all-women teams. The federation provides the boats and teams usually provide the paddles.

“It is a humbling sport,” Valientes reiterates. “You’re out there in the water, seated side by side, it’s a sport of unity. No one can single-handedly lead the team to victory and yet it takes only one person to be off-time and everyone loses.”

The sport is also a celebration of diversity. There are lawyers, doctors, housewives, breast cancer survivors, those simply looking for a different fitness regimen – individuals of various backgrounds but with a common passion for teamwork and the discipline to wake up at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning to train with the team for an hour or two in Manila Bay.

But the beauty of the sport comes not only from precise teamwork but from its rich history and culture. It is said to commemorate the death of Qu Yuan, a Chinese poet who cast himself into a river as his final protest against a corrupt government. Local fishermen, moved by this patriotic act, raced to the place where Qu Yuan fell to try and recover his body and to ward off fish and sea serpents by pounding on drums and throwing rice cakes into the water. Dragon boat races held all over the world reenact this historical scene, the canoes decked with colorful dragon heads and tails, as tradition goes, to placate the waters and ensure a speedy journey.

On Sept. 26, the dragon boat teams would have been training for one such race, the PDBF’s second quarter regatta this month. Valientes and his fellow sportsmen never expected to be part of an actual rescue. And yet it only seemed natural for the dragon boat paddlers to come to the aid of families that had been stranded by tropical storm “Ondoy.”

As news broke out on Sunday of hundreds of Metro Manila residents who had spent an entire day on the roofs of their houses without food or water, Valientes received a call from Guillermo Luz, executive vice president of Ayala Foundation, where he works as a senior development specialist for Ayala Technology Business Incubators. The foundation had already begun relief operations but Luz said that rescue boats were needed in communities with deep floodwaters. Valientes contacted his fellow Manila Dragons as well as PDBF vice president Angel Miranda, who gathered 40 dragon boat paddlers from different teams to converge at their training grounds and arranged for four boats to be transported by truck to Marcos Highway in Marikina and Cainta. Later they used rubber boats to rescue people or deliver food rations to those unwilling to leave their submerged houses in Pasig.

Some members had loved ones who were among those who needed assistance and they tried to help as many as they could along the way to their families. “When you bring food to them, you think you’d feel happy,” relates Valientes. “Instead you feel somewhat numb because there are many more around you who also need help. I realized that you don’t have a right to complain when you see people experience something like that first hand.”

“It makes you restless,” says Valientes of the whole experience. “You want something done right away and it’s a good thing we had a good number of people who came to help. At the same time, you hope and pray that you still have the energy to do the same tomorrow.”

The dragon boat teams pressed on with their rescue operations for a couple of days but they continued to support or create their own relief drives well after that. The Manila Dragons, for instance, pooled resources to set up a soup kitchen one weekend. The unity and camaraderie that carried the teams through so many races as well as their shared passion for the sport found new expression in their contribution to the relief efforts.

But these days they are restless for another reason. After three typhoons in succession, the teams are waiting for Manila Bay to turn calm. When it does, the sight of paddles flying in unison, and the graceful dragon boats gliding across the water, would take on new significance for the team members and the people they helped.