CHINESE NEW YEAR 2006

IBM Dragons on Demand put in a great show!

The Chinese New Year dragon boat races at Darling Harbour
are the most prestigious and exciting of the season.
They are the finalé to the Chinese New Year celebrations
and are a great spectacle to behold. Our HR Manager,
Robert Orth was one of our many supporters, cheering the
teams onto victory! The weather was very kind to us this
year after the miserable rainy day we had last year.
In fact it was probably a bit too sunny as some of us ended
up quite sunburnt!

The layout of the course is such that when in the far right
lanes the boats have to brake immediately after passing the
finish line in order to avoid a collision with the jetty.
This is always a fine line, but one that we’ve managed to
master so far! This is also where our supporters congregated
to help surge us onto victory (or maybe stop us crashing!)

This year we’ve had a huge influx of new paddlers, enough to
have been able to have entered 2 crews in the races: new faces
to cheer and new faces to really get carried away with the
excitement of competition and working as a team to achieve some
great results.
The day started with 2 heats for each of the 40 or so entries in
the Corporate category. Both of our teams did remarkably well.
One team came first in both its heats and the other 2nd. In fact,
one of the crews produced a time in a heat (1:04.06) that was better
than the time the victorious IBM crew had needed to win the whole
event in both 2003 and 2004 so that just shows what enthusiasm,
training and a will to succeed can achieve!

The times produced by both teams were good enough to make it to the
B final where we had to race against each other. We finished 3rd
and 6th respectively with times of 1:04.81 and 1:07.15.

There was also an industry challenge which had us race against the
very best of teams, again competing against each other. We came in
4th and 6th in that race.

One of the highlights of the day is a flower ceremony performed by
the Dragons Abreast ladies. The Dragons Abreast crews are predominantly
made up of ladies who have survived breast cancer. They have grown in
numbers exponentially over the past few years, originating in their
conception due to the rehabilitation benefits of paddling. This year
there were 12 crews of ‘survivors’ and 3 crews of supporters. The
ceremony is a chance to think about those who have been lost. The IBM
crews started a guard of honour for all the ladies with our paddles
forming an archway for them to exit whilst we clapped their efforts.
This was continued by many other teams, stopping 2 of the little Darling
Harbour trains.

The highlight of the day was the A final with 6 very strong teams contesting
the very large trophy up for grabs. All teams finished within less
than half a second of each other. The winner was the engineering firm
Arup, captained by our coach Mark van Uden, so we were very happy to
see them victorious! Their time was an amazing 1:01.31.

Babes:
Julie Mungomery, Cindy McCutcheon, Danielle Harmer, Danielle Toon,
Claire Shah, Deborah Date-Chong, Anne Wilkes, Natalie Muchar,
Evelyn Lim, Ingrid Sumargo, Lili Luong, Ramak Salamat, Bushra Qureshi,
Crystal Kim Sing, Sian Summers, Liz Gibson, Eunice Gilbang

Bruisers:
John He, Peter Marcinasko, Richard Wilcox, Greg Zajaczkowski,
William Wenkart, Mitchell Seeto, Scott Le, Paul Tompsett, Ajay Brar,
Sam Lawrence, Zohaib Qureshi, Ian Agahari, Robert Devienne,
Angel Ioannou, Krishna Naidu, Gregor Erdmann, Eddy Au, Eric Wong,
Tony Farrell, Melvin Ng, Arjang Salamat, Bin Chen, John Carroll,
Eizac Chee, Faisel Mirza

For more information on joining IBM Dragons On Demand, please contact John or Ingrid.

Article by Julie Mungomery