5th Annual Long Beach | July 28-29

Squad	Division	Place
LA Dragon Boat Club	Open III	1st
LA Dragon Boat Club	Open IV	2nd
LA Dragon Boat Club	Women	2nd

This year marked our first major media push. We spent countless hours creating logos, pamphlets and brochures to entice the public to join what we knew to be the bestest team in the world, LARD.

This year also saw the birth of our lil green mascot, Crisco. Yes indeed, the Los Angeles Racing Dragons have a mascot, a chubby green dragon named after hydogenated shortening. Because if you're going to be LARD you might as well bake with Crisco.

One of the few good pictures of Kenny.

Kenny, having the largest vehicle on the team, was often the de-facto equipment manager on top of his web authoring duties. The first versions of the website were very rudimentary (I wish I kept a snapshot of them because they were horrible). The plastic sidewalk A-frame was probably the biggest pain to tote about. It was setup every weekend during practice with the idea of attracting people who were locals and were already familiar with the Mother's Beach locale. It was a good idea, especially at the Long Beach race, but it has disappeared in one of our many moves.

This tournament, LARD joined forces with the Killer Guppies (our first local rivals) to create a local "super-team." Our angel supporter, Dr. Chen, pushed our teams to new levels of competitiveness by convincing top teams from Taiwan, Washington and other places far and near to raise the level of competition at the Long Beach race. We still needed more time to refine our training.

This year also marked our first race injury. Nick Wang towards the end of the festival was out in the rocks trying to catch goldfish or some such nonsense when he cut the bottom of his foot bad enough to get a trip to the emergency room and a set of stiches. If you look at the bike ride this year, you will see him with crutches. Sheesh.

Kenny reminiscing 2010

We joined forces with Killer Guppies for some heats

 

Women's Division II 2nd Place