Racing the Dragon

By Amanda Bower / San Francisco

Until she stepped into a dragon boat, Kathy Pollonais-Britt was most emphatically not a team player. The veteran marathon runner loved the solitude of pounding the pavement, not the egoism and pressure of team sports. "I'd never been a groupie," she says. But when her employer, the health-care company Kaiser Permanente, sponsored the San Francisco International Dragon Boat Festival last year, the social worker was intrigued. In dragon-boat racing, a 2,000-year-old Chinese sport traditionally held on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, paddlers race to a drummer's beat in a long, narrow boat decorated at bow and stern with a dragon's head and tail. Pollonais-Britt, 52, climbed aboard with 21 co-workers for what she thought would be a few practice sessions and one pleasant day on the water. Fast-forward nine months, and she is helping lead the Kaiser Permanente Dragon Healers' weekly training runs as the team prepares to race in at least three festivals this year. "Our first day back on the water this season was in February, with hail, rain, freezing cold," says Pollonais-Britt. "And 27 people showed up. It was amazing."

That just one dragon-boat festival could turn a loner athlete into a committed groupie is no surprise to Jeff Campbell. He watched his first dragon-boat festival in Portland, Ore., in 1993 and left transformed. "[It] has this visceral feel that appeals to everyone," Campbell says. "The beat of the drums, the spray of the water from the crashing bow of the boat, and 20 people working as one to breathe life into the dragon."

Campbell, who had previously played golf and beach volleyball, eventually raced on the U.S. national team at two world championships. After leaving a career in corporate security, he decided to devote himself full time to organizing dragon-boat festivals. He is now one of a handful of dragon-boat diehards--race organizers, boat suppliers and equipment designers--who are trying to turn the ancient Chinese pastime into the next big thing in American team sports.

Ten years ago, the only way to see a dragon boat was to visit one of the handful of festivals organized primarily by Chinese-American cultural organizations in cities with large Asian-American populations, like New York City and San Francisco. The popularity of those events (the annual race held in Flushing, N.Y., attracted 50,000 spectators last year) spread their appeal to community groups looking for a fun summer fund-raising event. Last year, according to Campbell, more than 75 dragon-boat festivals were held in 31 states and 70 cities across the country, with participation up 20% over 2004, to 54,000 people.

Campbell saw a business opportunity in running the complicated logistics of an event that can involve more than 2,000 competitors and dozens of weeks of preparation. His fledgling company, USA Dragon Boating, organizes festivals for a fee. He will set up the racecourse and conduct paddling and coaching clinics before the event to make sure participants don't end up in the drink on race day. Local organizers, typically charitable or cultural groups, are responsible for land-based arrangements: tents, Porta Pottis, bringing in sponsorships, cultural activities, food services--anything that draws crowds and meets their needs. Some festivals attract more than 100 teams, each paying an entry fee of up to $2,500 for a corporate team of at least 20 paddlers.

Usually, heats are held with four or five teams competing at a time, paddling down lanes marked on the water. "I make sure there's all the proper equipment, that the equipment is equal and that the course is fair," says Campbell. "You can't have one lane catching a current. After that, it's a matter of how technical the organizers want to get. I can bring computers and digital cameras and give a high-tech flavor to the event, or you can have four people with stopwatches at the finish line."

But no one gets to the finish line without a boat. A dragon boat weighs as much as 2,000 lbs. and can cost $6,000 to $14,000, depending on the design, craftsmanship and materials used. That doesn't include the recurring cost of trailering the boats to different competitions. Given such expenses, many teams don't even own their boats; they share them. The California Dragon Boat Association, for example, has a complicated practice schedule to allow more than 20 crews, including the City College of San Francisco and the Rainbow Koi, a team of gay and lesbian paddlers, to train on San Francisco's Lake Merced, sharing just eight boats.

"The only reason the sport is not more widespread now is the lack of equipment," Campbell says. No dragon boats are currently manufactured in the U.S., so most teams have to import them from Germany, although more affordable models from other European and Asian manufacturers are catching up in quality. In the meantime, a Canadian marketing company, Great White North Communications, is filling the void. The Toronto-based firm owns a fleet of 40 boats and charges some $30,000 to provide consulting, technical support and boat hire for dragon-boat festivals.

Great White North's principals, Mike Kerkmann and Barbara Goldberg, started the company in 1993 by organizing a single event in Toronto. But Canada's weather limited the company's growth, so in 2001 they launched into the U.S. Now, they're involved in almost 50 festivals in Canada and the U.S.--by far the biggest commercial organizer in North America. "In Canada, it's a four- or five-month season at the most, but in Florida, we can operate year-round," says Kerkmann. For a start-up festival, his company arranges everything from the paddles to the practice sessions, but as local organizers take on some of those tasks, Great White North moves into leasing or selling the boats. "In the first year, they might break even after paying our fees," Kerkmann says. "But then they've got the communication plans, the models of sponsorship packages, entry brochures. The next year they might need half our services. In future years they invest in equipment, so they don't have to lease."

One of the fastest-growing markets for dragon-boat racing is the corporate retreat in need of a little excitement. "You can have a big sales meeting, boring meetings for three days, and then one afternoon, we can work with the event planner and produce a four-hour mini-dragon-boat regatta for 500 people," Kerkmann says. It's one of the few sports that can accommodate people of any size and any level of fitness, as long as they can keep their paddle dipping in and out of the water in time with their teammates. "There are no heroes, no one to drop the pop fly or strike out," says Kerkmann.

Corporations are proving to be among the most enthusiastic dragon boaters in the country. Kaiser Permanente, which sees dragon boating as an exercise in team building, has shelled out almost $40,000 for two boats and enough paddles and life vests for two teams. One boat went to its longest-paddling team of employees, the KP Dragons, and the other is shared among Pollonais-Britt's Dragon Healers and other crews in the California Dragon Boat Association. Teams like the Wal-Mart Warriors, VeRizing Dragons and Starbucks Waverunners have also entered festivals around the country, in competition against schools, police and fire departments and, in what has become a global phenomenon in dragon boating, groups of breast-cancer survivors.

When those paddlers get serious, they come to Arin Chang, who makes high-end carbon-fiber paddles designed specifically for dragon boats. A former engineer for a mountain-bike company, Chang got involved with dragon boats in 1999 and quickly became an elite competitor, traveling to events in Europe, Australia and Canada. He soon realized that boaters were slowed by traditional wooden paddles, and he designed a lighter, stiffer version that he started selling in 2000 under the brand Burnwater.

"The beginning years were very tough, because people were used to spending $30 or $40 for a cheap wooden paddle," Chang says. But individual members of his own team bought and promoted the paddles, figuring they might invest just as much, about $200, in a carbon-fiber tennis racquet. The Foster City, Calif., company's sales got a boost in 2003 when the entire Australian national team ordered Burnwater paddles. Chang sells about 100 paddles a month, six times as many as he sold two years ago, and has competition from a handful of other companies making their own high-tech paddles. "The way I look at it, the more competition we have in the market, the better it is for growing the sport." Now there's a team player.