Dragonboating is a team sport that races with 20 or 10 people across various distances. While immensely popular through Asia, it has a growing culture in Australia becoming more popular each year. It seems that nearly anywhere that has water, there will be a dragonboat with teams from far Western Australia, to Darwin, all along sunny Queensland, down through Sydney, Canberra, South Coast, Melbourne and the south of Adelaide. Each teams from all parts of the country train together and compete at local, state, national and international level wherever possible, making there no shortage of competition.
While teams may be good, as all sports go, we find the best of the best and prove on a world stage the capabilities we have. In dragonboat racing has competed with an Australian, known as the Australian Auroras, since 2010. The Australian Dragonboat Federation created this team to gather the best from the country and give everyone the chance to be apart of the team. Before 2010, the winning state team overall at the Australian Championships would go on to represent Australia, which wasn't always the best team possible.
Since then, each Successful campaign the Auroras has competed in has be greater, with more medals and a fitter, faster team. The Auroras compete every two years in the Dragonboat World Championship across multiple age categories, and the International Dragonboat Federation Asian Championships, along with small international regattas.
in 2014, the Auroras will be competing in this years Asian Championship, held in Macau, just off China. One week after this, a selected 20 from the Auroras will continue on to compete in the first ever Dragonboat World Cup, in Fuzhou China.
This is an exciting time for the dragonboat community, and each year the selected team becomes stronger and more fit. For this campaign, there has been 25 men and 24 women selected to be apart of the team, going through a series of benchmarks and trainings to prove their strength and ability to be apart of the team.
This blog will focus mainly on three out of the 49, just to share their story and journey along the way.
Adrian Andrews, Adrian Liszczynsky and myself, Marcelo Cabezas, are just only three members but will be sharing the journey towards as we reach closer to our competition. more post will follow giving a bio on each of us, and the pathways we have come to get to where we are now.
