Dragon Boat Racing

Just as John MacGregor first recognised and promulgated the idea of recreational canoeing and kayaking as a sport in the mid 1800s (see Canoe Sport below) one hundred years later expatriate Brit, John Pain in Hong Kong and UK based Mike Haslam, were largely responsible for recognising that dragon boat ‘Festival Racing’, could be developed into a modern water sport.

Dragon boats have been raced in the waters surrounding Hong Kong since time immemorial and also in Japan for several centuries, but it was not until 1976, through the efforts of John Pain, then the Executive Director of the Hong Kong Tourist Association (HKTA) now the Hong Kong Tourism Board (HKTB), and Philip Lai Kwok Kui, the then Chairman of the Joint Association of Hong Kong Fishermen, that the first international dragon boat races were organised in Hong Kong.

These first International Races evolved to become the annual Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival, International Races, or HKIR for short. This concept of promoting tourism and aspects of Chinese culture, through Dragon Boat Festival Races, quickly spread to other cities in the Pacific Basin, such as Singapore, Penang, Osaka and later Auckland, Sydney and Vancouver.

By the mid 1980s the HKIR had become the unofficial world club crew championships, organised jointly by the Hong Kong Amateur Rowing Association and the HKTA, under the leadership of Bob Wilson and Mason Hung.

In 1980 the HKTA sent three Dragon Boats to London for a Chinese Festival on the River Thames. Mike Haslam, the then Chairman of Olympic Canoe Racing in the UK took them to Nottingham, where he organised the first formal Dragon Boat Races in Great Britain in 1981.

In 1982 Mike wrote a report on the potential of Dragon Boat Racing, as a sport, and presented his views to both the British Canoe Union (BCU) and the ICF. The BCU declined to become involved in this new sport and in 1986 the ICF, under its then President Sergio Orsi, declared that whilst it was a paddle sport, dragon boating was not a discipline of canoeing and should be allowed to develop in its own way, without interference or input from the ICF, unless requested.