Emily Ma grew up watching dragon-boat racers clad in ski caps and ski masks paddle through ice back home in Vancouver, B.C. These days, she’s navigating warmer waters as one of the coaches for the Stanford Dragons, a group of 25 Stanford students and alumni who have raced competitively since 1999.
Dragon-boat festivals in China date back more than 2,000 years. The sport, featuring long dragon-shaped canoes, has grown in popularity in the past few decades. The Stanford team was organized by a group of alumni who were already dragon boating with other teams. Last September, they won the Novice B division at the Northern California International Dragon Boat Championship and Festival.
Distinguished by red bandannas and their “fearsome” guttural cheer, the Stanford Dragons rely on a rhythmic drumbeat to synchronize their paddling. Regardless of their size, “everyone has to agree to paddle 55 strokes a minute. You make that agreement and when it works, you feel like you’re part of a single entity,” says Ma, ’03, MS ’04.
