Chu Yuan (
For the first time in many years, both Taipei City's Taipei International Dragon Boat Race Championship and the Taipei County Assembly Speaker's Cup are being held over the same weekend.
On top of this, the Assembly Cup has also gone international for the first time, to become the Formosa International Dragon Assembly Speaker's Cup.
The result is a situation where it is not clear if the principle competition is between the boats themselves or the organizers of the rival events.
Disgruntled as many team managers, coaches and participants may be about what they see as an unwanted rivalry over participants, status and news coverage, the races' organizers vehemently deny any such thing.
"I've never meant to compete with Taipei City," said Fung Chien-tang (
"It's Taipei City that's being more aggressive by raising the amount of money they spend on the races and by raising their prize money too. But I don't think any of that's necessary. I've never needed anything more than NT$20,000 to put on a race and I've never said I have to have 100 teams," he said.
But several people in Northern Taiwan's dragon boat circles claim that it was Taipei County -- tired of taking a backseat to the city race by holding their competition a week earlier every year -- that decided to up the ante by scheduling the Assembly Cup over the same weekend and by adding an international division to its roster.
One team told the Taipei Times that it had wanted to double-enter the two competitions and try going back and forth between the races over the weekend. But the team's manager said that while the team wasn't explicitly told not to double enter, it came under significant pressure from Taipei County not to do so.
"The message was: `If you're going to practice here [on the Pitan River] and if we're going to let you use our boats, we really, really don't want you to go to Taipei City too," the manager, who preferred to remain anonymous, said.
Fung said, however, that Taipei County welcomed double entrants and that it wouldn't try to keep teams from going wherever they wanted to race.
Taipei City organizers echoed Fung's comments and said the real reason the races were scheduled for the same weekend was that everyone just wanted to have their competitions on the actual weekend of the Dragon Boat Festival.
"The most important thing to us is to organize a good event," said Yang Ya-ting (楊雅婷), one of the organizers of the Taipei City race. "We want to have the race on the Dragon Boat Festival. It's more meaningful that way.
"As far as competing with other people, it's a non-issue."
Style vs substance
Whatever the reasons behind the two organizing groups' breaking from their practice of holding their competitions on different weekends, dragon boat-racing aficionados say the end result is that the most competitive domestic teams will be at the county race while the city race will be more style than substance.
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