My webmaster, Bill Simon, is coach of a Chinese dragon-boat team, based in Long Beach, CA. He sends link to a video of a close race in Vancouver last month:

Here is the 500M race for the medals in the Comp C division of the 2006 Vancouver (ALCAN) Dragon Boat festival that was held on June 18, 2006. Now you can actually see how close this race was.

LARD (Los Angeles Racing Dragons, our local rivals) came in first (in the lane 4th from the top). We, the Los Angeles Killer Guppies, (in the 3rd lane from the top) came in about 3/4 boat behind them–and that put us in 9th place! We were separated by less than 2.5 second! Our time was 2:09.

I know how intense this was for us on the boat. But now I know what the crowd experienced. This is the closest Dragon Boat race I’ve ever seen. Awesome! Congrats to LARD! But just wait till next year…

This is my kind of multiculturalism.