Team Citizen’s dragon boat racing caper: All wet

Almost dead last.

That’s where Team Citizen finished in the Dragon Boat races this past weekend.

We were close to finishing dead last, but the City of Peachtree City’s team finished two-tenths of a second behind us. They also capsized their boat after completing their first race.

It was a close competition between the two teams for the booby prize, but we just eked out the moral victory. Heck, all weekend long we thought we had finished in last place, but today we received the joyous news.

Today, we feel like the luckiest team on the face of the earth (add echo effect here).

Still, there is a lot of room for improvement and, boy, do we know it.

The Citizen has competed together in two athletic competitions: Softball in Peachtree City years ago and the Dragon Boat races this past weekend.

Our softball team’s main highlight was completing one 1-2-3 inning in our season and our Dragon Boat highlight was faster times in each of our three races. Unfortunately our opponents were faster each time as well.

C’est la vie.

Now, why did we have such a poor showing? Were the other teams head and shoulders better than us? Well, yes, probably. We had far fewer men on our boat than any other team and we had the widest range of ages on our boat — some 50 years between our youngest rower and our oldest rower.

I’m not trying to make excuses, but there it is.

The announcer jokingly stated that we would be running an expose on steroids usage by our opponents in today’s paper. We would never stoop that low.

I did offer a front page Dining Guide feature to Panda Express, our second opponent of the day, and I’m surprised they didn’t take it. Their excellent food at their booth at the Touch the World festival was a good enough advertisement.

Still, the whole day was fun and that’s all that most of us wanted from the experience.

We will return next year and vow to make a better showing.

We’ll be holding tryouts soon.

Both the Touch the World festival and the Dragon Boat races were terrific events. Drake Field was a beautiful location and the weather was perfect. It is a great starting point for what should be an even bigger and better event next year.

One thing I would like to see is more international flair.

Other than some different international foods for sale and some performers (Ryan Academy of Irish Dancing and Chinese singers) there wasn’t a lot of international stuff going on that I could see.

I would have liked to have seen more international dress and more international music. There could have been people from the Hispanic Heritage Festival that used to take place at City Hall Plaza, the Japanese-American Friendship Society, salsa dance lessons and more.

There was a decent-sized area of lawn between the team tents and the food vendors that could be used for more demonstrations, perhaps international games like bocce ball, etc.

If you missed Touch the World and the Dragon Boat races, you missed something really cool. It was great to see so many people from the community come together and enjoying something different. I hope this becomes an annual tradition that continues to grow.