By Chris Fuchs
It was depressingly overcast with a dreary drizzle, but none of that deterred more than 90 teams from competing in the 11th annual Dragon Boat Festival in Flushing Meadows Corona Park last weekend or the thousands of onlookers who turned out to cheer them on.
Like ducks in a pond, the heads of dragons attached to the sleek boats jutted out with successive strokes of the oars, and the even-paced, monotonic drumming coming from the lake sounded like muzzled gunshots.
“If you take it seriously, it’s a very demanding sport,” said Garrett McAllister, 51, the steerer for JPMorganChase, one of the teams in the race.
JPMorganChase does take the sport seriously. This year the company had two teams competing, each with 20 members. Practice began in late May with members meeting at least once a week. A consistent regiment of aerobic exercise, weight training, and a sensible diet was encouraged.
JPMorganChase did make it to first place against three other teams in one of the event’s 44 heats. Actually, the hardy rowers would have gone home with just second-place honors, but the RCN Communications team, whose rowers initially grabbed first honors, was disqualified because they had not registered, said Wallace Wang, team coordinator for the Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival in New York.
That pushed JPMorganChase up to first place, Verizon to second place, and your humble servants, the TimesLedger, to third place but the team was disqualified because the boat shifted into another lane, said Wang.
The winners of the big enchalada — a $10,000 check — were, as fate would have it, out-of-towners. The Philadelphia Men’s Dragon Boat Team won first place in the 250-meter, 500-meter, and 1,000-meter races in the Open Championship, earning the prize money amassed from sponsors’ contributions.
The festival — the 11th time the annual event was held in Flushing Meadows Corona Park — attracted thousands of people, a mix of ethnicities from black to Hispanic to Asian to white.
Ian Brooks, the announcer who called the race from atop a movable tower, gazed into the swarms of spectators around 1:30 p.m. Saturday, estimating that there must have been at least 10,000 people.
McAllister, a resident of Bayshore, L.I., has been on the team since 1994, when he joined after reading in a company newsletter that a branch manager in Chinatown was trying to assemble a team. He is an employee of JPMorganChase, but 40 percent of his teammates are not, such as Lucy Tom of Brooklyn.
Tom, 23, decided to paddle for the first time this year. Paddling in the rear of the boat near the dragon’s tail, Tom joined the team through a friend of hers — and a sheer desire to participate in an event that she remembers in fine detail as a 7-year-old on a visit to southern China.
The festival has its roots in third century B.C. China. Legend has it that Qu Yuan, a court minister, advocated reforms for his home province of Chu, but the king was angered by his proposals and banished him. He traveled the country, writing poetry about his concerns and his people.
In 278 BC, after hearing that his homeland had been invaded, Yuan jumped into the Mi Lo River to drown himself. Fishermen waded into the river to rescue him, but to no avail. They beat drums and threw rice dumplings into the water to prevent the fish and purported lake dragons from eating his body.
News Editor David Glenn contributed to this story.
Reach reporter Chris Fuchs by e-mail at timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 156.
