Dragon boat teams hurdle Asiad standards

MANILA—The two Philippine dragon boat teams justified their places in the Guangzhou Asian Games by easily hurdling the qualifying mark, set by the Philippine Olympic Committee, during yesterday’s time trials at the La Mesa Dam. The men’s and women’s teams raced against the clock in three events—200 meters, 500m and 1,000m—and came out with impressive results that stunned the joint monitoring body of the POC and the Philippine Sports Commission. In the 200m, the men’s crew clocked 41.88 seconds to hurdle the qualifying time of 47.74, while surpassing the 42.15 time of Indonesia during the 2008 Dragon Boat Asian Championship held in Penang, Malaysia. The ladies clocked 46.85 over the same distance, beating the 49.07 standard and eclipsing China’s golden effort of 47.68 in the Asian Championship. The POC set the bronze-medal clocking in the Asian Championship as its qualifying standard. The male paddlers also showed outstanding clockings in the 500m (1:47) and 1000m (3:47) to beat the qualifying marks of 1:55.70 and 5:04.53, respectively. Indonesia clocked 1:49.79 for the gold in the 500m of the Asian meet. The lady paddlers registered 1:58.38 in the 500m to surpass the qualifying time of 2:06.85 and the gold-medal clocking of China (2:06.77). In the 1000m, the women timed 4:08, easily beating the 5:28 standard. Present during the early-morning trials were PSC officials led by commissioner Buddy Andrada and POC monitoring committee head Jeff Tamayo. “We’re awaiting the report of the monitoring committee,” said Asian Games chef de mission Joey Romasanta. Each dragon boat team is composed of 20 paddlers a side with one drummer and one sweep or helmsman.