The Wunderdragons, had an amazing, exciting and fiercely competitive Sunday at the London Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival 2009.
Boating attire
Easily the best dressed among the 41 other teams. In our purple shirts and bandanas, face painted (some of us head-to-toe) and loud, we made our mark all right.
Roaring start
We came out firing in our first and second races, winning both of them. In our third race, we came up against two very strong teams, with one (the eventual overall winners) storming ahead, but the other team just ahead of us at the finish. No matter, as our combined times put us in 9th place, which meant we'd made the semi-finals.
Nail-biting semis
Our heat for the semis put us against the top team again, but we held our own against the others, storming across the line in 2nd place. That meant we had a chance to make it into the finals, but only if the other teams in the semis couldn't beat our time of 54 seconds.
We waited, our hearts pumping fast in anticipation, for the list of teams that had made the finals... and we were first to be called out. Yeah!
For a team of first-timers, who had only had one or two practice sessions, making the finals was something to be genuinely proud of.
Final showdown
We were still pumped, focused and grittily determined to do well in the final race. All the teams were so rapt at the start you could hear the rain hitting the water around us.
On the shout 'go' it was just a case of putting everything we'd learnt into practice. Keep facing forward, maintaining our form and timing, and putting every bit of power we had left into racing to the finish line. It was a close battle right up to the line and none of us really knew how we'd done.
After the race, we waited for the final results... 8th place was called out, 7th place was called out, then 6th place... then at 5th we heard the Wunderdragons. Yay! Woohoo! Up against teams who had been practising for months, we proved we could race with the best.
A big thank you to all those colleagues and friends who were game enough to head way out East to come along and support us, we really appreciated you being there, cheering us along.
And even if our timing was off in places, we had a great skipper, a Wunderful team spirit and the determination to do well. Taking 5th place at such a prestigious event is “like a Disney movie,” as someone in the team described.
We were on fire all day and everyone put in a fantastic effort. The team on the day were:
- Kevan Ansell (the purple one)
- Nick Boettcher (Captain)
- Claire Compton
- Chris Conway
- Simon Diss
- Annie Gass (Drummer)
- Roz Hase (Right Stroke)
- Rebecca Hanson
- Nick Hearne
- Nathan Huynh
- Sarah Lacy
- Gonzalo Ocio
- Jacqueline Peers
- Romain Sarradin
- Martin Shuttleworth
- Paul Stockdale
- Glenn Sturgess
- Liz Wise
- Serena Wong (Left Stroke)
See them all in action our WundermanUK Flickr pages!
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