The original plan for the dragonboat festival was to have 500 meter races on Friday and 200 meter races on Saturday, with Sunday being a potential makeup day. Since Friday’s races had to be canceled, we did race on Sunday, but instead of doing 500s (which is what we mostly trained for the past year) we did 1000 meter races, which involved a turn. Fortunately, we had raced 1500 meters in Victoria so we were somewhat prepared. Also, it turned out, no one really seemed to care about the races on Sunday.
We didn’t have to be at the race site until noon on Sunday, which was lovely. It meant Mary and I could get our regular Aix les Bains breakfast with fixings from 3 different businesses. It also meant I could just lie in bed and read awhile.
The festival provided buses to transport us to the race site, but they always left way earlier than we needed to be there – I believe it was 10 am on Sunday. At 11:30 a couple teammates and I took an Uber to the race site. As we were entering the festival area a woman behind us asked if we needed any extra paddlers because so many people on her team had gone home already, they couldn’t fill a boat. I was surprised, because both the festival and our coach made it very clear we were not to leave Aix les Bains until Monday.
The Athlete’s village – what they called the area where every team had a tent and chairs – was the least crowded I’d seen it. A lot of teams had apparently not counted Sunday into their plans. We were at our tent in plenty of time, and told to come back at 12:45 for a team picture. In the meantime I had jerseys to trade. This is a big deal at these international festivals. Most people buy extra race jerseys to trade. I bought one extra race jersey and also brought my last year’s jersey, which I didn’t really like, and two other Pink Phoenix shirts that were duplicates. (As I was writing this I went to look at my trades and only saw 3, which is confusing because I could have sworn I traded 4.)
A large number of our team in France were either rookies this year or last year – I’m the latter. We had never traded jerseys or pins before and did not have the finesse and know how that the more experienced paddlers had. I still had pins to trade, but by Sunday it seemed like everyone had traded away their pins.
The pros only traded for pins they liked, but we rookies and near-rookies didn’t know how to actually do that, since people would thrust their pins at us and we felt it was impolite to look at a pin and say we didn’t want it. It was the same for the shirts. The pros told us, “Don’t get pressured into taking a jersey you don’t want.” There was a team from Florence, Italy whose jersey I coveted. It was white and said Firenze in pink along the side. I had gone to their tent on Saturday and asked if they had any to trade and I think they said, “Come back tomorrow.” It was a lot of gesturing. I used to know a little Italian, but once I started focusing on French, both my Italian and Spanish deserted me, though I did remember “Grazie” and “Ciao”. People loved it when I attempted to speak their language.
There was also a tent I went to on Saturday that was a composite team from all over France. A number of them really wanted my jersey, but theirs were too small for me. One woman, however, said that she would bring an X-Large on Sunday and we could trade then. I headed over to that tent first thing on Sunday, and no one was there. Then I headed to the Florence tent, which was completely empty. I spent the rest of the morning wandering around trying to find a shirt I liked to trade for. I usually had a teammate with me – we tended to do this in pairs – and even when we didn’t trade shirts, we spent time talking to people on the other teams. It was really great.
The problem for me was that I needed a size 2X and most of the women wore smaller sizes, so eventually I was just trying to find anyone who had an extra large. Plenty of people also came to our tent and wanted to trade, some of them my size, but I told them I couldn’t trade my race jersey because I was saving it for the French composite team, and the visitors to our tent all wanted our race jersey, not the other ones I was hawking.
I went back to the composite tent numerous times and no one was there. Finally a teammate told me to just trade it to someone else. I preferred to trade my jersey to a non-American country, and I also was avoiding red states (my own silent protest), though I would have totally given up my scruples for a shirt from a team called Missabittatitti. Their jerseys were hot items.
In the end, I got three jerseys I’m very happy with – from Italy, Argentina, and Germany – see photos below.
I believe our race was the second to last one so I had plenty of time to wander around and meet people and also just hang out in our tent, which is one of my favorite parts of racing. It kind of reminds me of being at track meets in high school, which also involved a lot of waiting around for races. It’s just a really pleasant communal experience. You can talk to people or you can put a hat over your head and fall asleep, but in the tent is where I’ve really gotten to know my teammates.
I had noticed earlier that no one was paying any attention to the 1000 meter races that were going on all day. The atmosphere felt so different from the day before – not at all tense – kind of like a garage sale in the last hour of the day. When it finally was time for us to race, I suggested we try to break 5 minutes, which was quite unrealistic – only the top 4 teams accomplished that. We ended up nowhere near 5 minutes and I can’t tell you exactly why. I think we got off course somehow – there was a point where it seemed like some men were yelling at us to stop, but we kept going. There were also numerous times when our tiller called “Hold the boat!” which means stop paddling and put your paddle straight down into the water to stop the boat. Sometimes she yelled “Hold the boat” for only one side of the boat. One time it seemed like maybe we were about to capsize – we were tilted way to one side – and Merle’s calls got us balanced again. Our final time was 7:17.49, way at the back of the pack. I was looking forward to watching the race, to see what actually happened, but the YouTube video ends right beforehand.
Our coach pointed out that at least we weren’t disqualified. A lot of teams were, including the Florence Dragon Lady teams whose jersey I coveted. I don’t think many of us were upset about the outcome. We had fun and did our best and did a fabulous job of following Merle’s orders.
When we got back to the dock and walked back up to the tents, we were greeted by our Oregon team lined up in two lines to form a corridor. At the very end was Mary, which was a big surprise to me, and it seems I yelled out, “I found my wife!”, which Mary took a movie of. (There was a lot of me not having any idea where Mary was over the weekend. I can also say that she didn’t have the wonderful experience I had, but I will leave it to her to write about it.) As we got to the end of the line, we joined the corridor and high-fived our teammates. There were also some French spectators lined up who high-fived us. I was loving it and also already getting sad that it was over and not wanting to say goodbye to my teammates, even though I would see them in a couple of weeks.
We went back to our tents and got our belongings – the place was pretty deserted at this point. Some people went back to their hotels and some of us stuck around. The first order on my agenda was to get a soft-serve ice cream cone. Several of my teammates had had them over the weekend, but because I couldn’t eat sugar until after the final race, I was very much coveting one. A bunch of our teammates were hanging out in an outdoor bar and restaurant just outside of the Athlete’s Village. Mary and I joined them there and had our ice cream and then we went to the lake and joined several of my teammates in the water.
We all went our separate ways the next day. We had a WhatsApp group for the Pink Phoenix France group, and in the past week and a half people have been posting pictures from their travels and writing about what an amazing time it was. When the YouTube videos came available on the website, people began to comment on them.
I forgot to mention that we had heard from one of our teammates back in Portland, that our Portland 56 team was chastised by the announcer of our 200 Final for waving at the drone prior to our race. He said we weren’t focused. After we watched the video, first one person on WhatsApp, then another, then a third, all said they had waved – and why not? We can have fun AND win races.
Pink Patrol Bochum from Germany. I traded with Kerstin.
