Dragon boat team goes for third straight world title | News Article

By Sid Ventura | Sportsaholic – Sat, Jul 30, 2011

Outside of Manny Pacquiao and our famed cue artists, you don't often see the words "world champion" and "the Philippines" in the same sentence. In reality, there's a group of 20 or so young men and women who have been world champions for the past four years.


Only a few people know that since 2007, our country has been home to the best dragon boat team in the world.

The teams of Philippine Dragon Boat Federation (PDBF) have struck gold in the last two stagings of the International Dragon Boat Federation World Championships, a biennial meet considered the Olympics of dragon boat racing which attracts the best dragon boat paddlers from more than 25 countries.

But as world champions go, the PDBF barely registers a blip in the collective consciousness of the Filipino public. What's worse, our champion paddlers are finding out the hard way that being the best in your sport won't necessarily attract financial support.

The PDBF won the gold medals in the Premier Men's and Mixed competitions of the International Dragon Boat World Championships two years ago in Prague, even setting a world record of 40.02 seconds in the first event. If this were any other sport, they would have been welcomed with a ticker-tape parade, inked endorsement deals, and become instant celebrities.

But the reality is something much more different. Until recently, the PDBF paddlers weren't even sure if they would be able to defend their titles in the 2011 edition set August 3 to 7 in Tampa, Florida. The team was short on funds and on top of that, several paddlers broke away from the PDBF to join a rival group, decimating the team and forcing the remaining paddlers to disband their standard boat team and form a small boat team instead.

Luckily, corporate sponsors like Cobra Energy Drink and Philippine Airlines stepped in to make sure the PDBF will get a shot at a third straight world title, albeit in a different event this time.

"We weren't able to form a standard boat team, so instead we'll just aim to also set a world record in the small boat race," said team captain Usman Anterola, who has the unenviable task of trying to lead the 25-strong PDBF delegation to a third straight gold-medal performance in Tampa.

A standard boat team has 22 members — 20 paddlers, one steersman and one signalman — while a small boat team has only 10 paddlers. "Small boat is more difficult because there are only 10 of you paddling," Anterola said.

This is the first time the PDBF will compete in the small boat category, so understandably the team is a little anxious. "We're nervous but we can't wait to compete. Since this is our first time in small boat, we're preparing not only twice as hard but three times," said Anterola, a member of the Philippine Army who has captained the dragon boat team since 2005.

Anterola, who has been paddling since 1998, thinks the Philippines has been excelling in this sport because of our geography. "Our country has a lot of islands, so being strong in paddling is sort of inherent in us."

Not surprisingly, the Philippines was one of the first countries to pick up the sport, and is a founder of the Asian Dragon Boat Federation. The PDBF won two gold medals in the ADBF Championships in 2008 in Penang, Malaysia.

Locally, there are about 25 different dragon boat clubs in the country. The PDBF organizes several races each year which attract teams from all over the world. There's a quarterly regatta at Roxas Boulevard, plus international races hosted by Boracay, CamSur and Subic. Anyone interested in trying out the sport can simply get in touch with any of the clubs.

A former varsity track and field athlete at Perpetual Help, Anterola was attracted to dragon boat rowing because "there's no MVP or superstar (while paddling), everyone is equal."

It's taken a lot of hard work and effort, but the PDBF has now earned the respect of other teams. When they first started competing in international races, teams from other countries initially mistook them for junior players. "Actually, the junior players of other countries were bigger than us. That's why they were shocked when we won the gold in the 200 meters (in 2007)."

The team set their first world record during that gold-medal effort in 2007 in Sydney with a time of 42.16 seconds in the standard boat race. They broke that record two years later in Prague, beating heavyweights from the United States, the Czech Republic and China, while also winning the gold in the mixed event.

For the PDBF paddlers, who come from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard, competing in the world championships is more a labor of love than anything else, since they don't get any regular allowance for their efforts.

"We don't do this for ourselves, but for the country," said Anterola.

The phrase "love of the game" is loosely thrown around in the sporting world. But in the case of our world-class dragon boat paddlers, it's a pretty accurate description for what they do.