Story & Photos Maren Fawkes

Video Pulling Through

“Don’t hold back, ladies! Move me!” The commanding voice travels to the riverbank from a long slender white boat with colored scales that knifes through the Willamette River on this cold gray March evening. The caller drives the twenty-two female paddlers of Team SOAR into high gear to finish a dragon boat sprint. Her voice captures the attention of people walking and jogging on the shore who turn to appreciate the seemingly effortless precision with which the crew members accelerate through the finish line.

The captivating effect of the caller, Corky Lai, contradicts her stout frame and spiky black hair, partially hidden by a light blue visor with a dragon boat team name embroidered on the front. Lai joined Team SOAR as coach in 2007 and quickly realized that its members were ready to compete in both the women’s and breast cancer survivor (BCS) divisions. Team SOAR's members have moved beyond surviving cancer — they are well-trained athletes who want to win.

Team SOAR, whose name is an acronym for Survivors On A River, was founded in 2003. It's a part of the International Dragon Boat Federation (IDBF), which includes more than sixty member countries and will seek formal Olympic status when it reaches the required seventy-five. Dragon boat racing originated in China more than 2,500 years ago, at about the same time that the ancient Greek precursors of the Olympics were first being staged. It is one of the oldest forms of organized competition. A resurgence in recent years has transformed dragon boat racing into one of the fastest-growing competitive water sports in the world.

The sport offers one of the purest forms of team competition: There are no individual stars on Team SOAR, only an exquisite synchronization of the group’s efforts. “Each race is won and lost in 1/100 of a second, and that second is the heart of the team,” Lai says. For these women, the intense shared experience of exhaustion and elation at the end of a race is hard to find anywhere else.

“Okay, ladies. Let it ride,” Lai shouts as Team SOAR powers through the race's end. Each team member pats the back of the woman in front of her. They have a few minutes to rest before they push their physical limits again. The sun has now set, and the river shimmers like spilled ink with the city lights of Portland, Oregon, reflected as bright colorful flickers on the water’s surface. The frigid March wind pelts the faces of the racers as they line up for the next sprint. Regardless of weather conditions, training for competitive dragon boat racing is a year-round activity that includes aerobic conditioning, weight training, and paddling practice.

Facing the stern, Lai surveys the eleven pairs of paddlers seated before her. Halfway back on the left sits Linda Farr, grinning broadly. As steam rises from the ear warmer that crowns her chin-length silvery gray hair, she takes a moment to catch her breath between sprints. Farr was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, at age 53, and had never participated in sports.

After being diagnosed with cancer a second time in 2006, Farr’s oncologist recommended she join a support group. At one of the first meetings, she encountered Team SOAR member Dana Nelson, who insisted that Farr come out for a practice and refused to take "no" for an answer. Petite at only five feet tall, she wasn’t sure she would be up to the challenge. “I thought, 'There is no way I can do this.' But after a few months, I remember looking in the mirror and seeing how my arms and back were starting to take shape as my muscles developed.” 

Until the mid-1990s, it was generally accepted that women who had undergone lymph node dissection should not participate in strenuous upper-body exercise because it was believed to cause lymphedema, a painful swelling of the limbs. Dr. Don McKenzie, an exercise medicine researcher from Vancouver, British Columbia, disproved this theory in 1996. He discovered that these women's quality of life improved from the exercise and from forming supportive relationships as a team. Now, there are more than 120 BCS teams worldwide.

Dr. Catherine Sabiston of McGill University followed twenty of the first BCS dragon boat team members in British Columbia. "The physical activity itself and the women the participants met acted as a sort of buffer to the enduring stress of cancer recovery," she concluded. "They started to live their lives like athletes. It was extremely empowering.”

Dragon boat racing creates a community in which every member is connected. Here, they have the support and companionship they need as well as the physical exercise that will aid their recoveries. 

A dragon boat paddler has to master a technique of delivering maximum propulsive force while maintaining perfect rhythm. Should her stroke be a fraction of a second too slow or too fast, she would throw off the paddlers both in front of and behind her. The resulting “caterpillar effect” would slow the boat dramatically. A single team member out of rhythm can cause the team to lose a race.

Among human-powered water racing crafts in international competition, a dragon boat is one of the largest of its kind. The boat itself is the size of two canoes in length and width, with more than a dozen benches. And, like a canoe, the vessel skims along the water’s surface, it’s hull drawing less than a foot despite its size. Generally, practice boats are modestly decorated in contrast to race boats, which are ornately adorned with a brightly painted dragon head, tail, and scales.

When maneuvering such a large vessel during a race, steering is vital. Team SOAR’s main tiller, Joyce Chua, stands at the rear of the boat like a Venetian gondolier. She skillfully guides the boat using a large wooden till to ensure the most efficient course and minimize course corrections that might throw off the team’s rhythm. Winter storms on the Willamette River challenge the tiller with additional obstacles, including submerged logs and parts of buildings or docks. In the spring, motorboaters add to the challenge by ignoring wake speed limits, repeatedly swamping the boat and soaking the team with freezing water. 

“From the first Saturday practice in early January, with the temperatures at 38 degrees, I was hooked,” says Sharon Cresalia, who joined Team SOAR in January 2007 and is now one of the team’s co-captains. After her bout with breast cancer and radiation, Cresalia wanted to find a group that could share her experiences but was not seeking a traditional support group. Her oncologist mentioned Team SOAR. “It seemed like a perfect fit –– a group who wanted to participate in physical activity,” Cresalia says.

But it’s not just the exercise — this is a serious competitive sport. With help from sponsors, team members finance competitions, which have taken them to countries all over the world, including South Africa, China, and Australia.

The average race is a five hundred-meter sprint, but races range in length from 250 to 2,000 meters. “The thing I like most about racing is the rush that you get just before the race begins,” Cresalia says. “You practice twelve months a year for two minutes of fame, so the build-up before a race can be tense.” A good race time for the five hundred-meter is less than two and a half minutes, depending on wind and river current conditions. The teams line up on the start line, four to nine boats across. Each paddler is ready and waiting for the race to begin. As the horn blasts, the participants propel their crafts forward, their concentration entirely on the caller at the front of the boat. “You are so focused, you have no idea where you have finished in the race,” Cresalia says.

The thrill of racing has gripped many paddlers. Lai joined the Wasabi Paddling Club in Portland because of its competitive spirit. “They were out there to paddle right, to paddle hard, and to win,” she says. She started paddling with another all-women’s competitive race team in the Wasabi Paddling Club and then began coaching the outrigger-canoe racers three years ago. Her first interactions with Team SOAR were as a guest coach, but even then Lai remembers seeing untapped potential and thinking, “Man, if they were my team, we’d be going places.”

Two years ago, Lai got her chance when she was asked to take over as head coach for Team SOAR. “They were hungry and felt like they were being treated as less than athletes.  I treated them like athletes, because that’s what they are.”

In her first season with the team, Lai was faced with a tough decision. Team SOAR had registered in both the women’s and the BCS divisions in an event in Long Beach, California. The event was billed as a huge race with teams from all over the country. As the race drew near, Lai discovered that because of an oversight, the team had not been entered in the women’s division. To make things worse, Team SOAR would not be racing exclusively against its peers, but against kids as well. This was not the kind of contest they’d been training for all year — to be the lunchtime entertainment. Unfortunately, Lai says, this is the way many people view BCS teams. She decided to pull the team out of the event. “My women are athletes. They train hard, and they should not be put in a situation where they’re not being taken seriously and embarrassed.”

Back on the Willamette River, practice continues. Race season officially began at Tempe Town Lake in Tempe, Arizona, at the end of March. While Team SOAR won the first race, the next boat was right on its tail. It’s clear the paddlers will have to challenge themselves in practice to stay ahead of the competition this season, which ends in October. “Focus, ladies,” Lai commands from the helm. Instantly, the chatter stops, and the women are poised with their paddles at the ready position, waiting for Lai’s next command. “Sit up straight, breathe in, and take it away.”