Jane Emerson is the mother of two young children and a member of Wellington’s CanThrive breast cancer dragon-boat crew.
OPINION: One of the world’s biggest international women’s sporting events recently took place on Lake Karapiro in the Waikato.
More than 2000 participants from across the globe gathered in 105 boats in mid-April, ready to battle it out on the water in the International Breast Cancer Paddlers Commission’s Participatory Dragon Boat Festival, held every three or four years.
You are forgiven if this is the first you’ve heard of it. The media definitely missed the boat on this one. Maybe this was because of the emphasis on participation. I suspect it was further relegated as a “women’s sport”.
But fear not. I am here to tell you what you missed. Participants came from 13 countries, including Cyprus, Romania, Italy, Argentina, Austria, Malaysia, Japan and Sweden.
There are not many sports where you can compete alongside a woman twice your age, but there was a 50-year age gap between some of the participants. And there is something special about this: a sharing of wisdom – and a helping hand getting into the boat.
All participants fought hard on the water and provided an exhilarating spectacle. But it was the fight off the water that set this event apart.
Each participant had previously been diagnosed with breast cancer or fought alongside someone who had (there were some special races for supporters). Some diagnoses were a long time ago. Some scars were still fresh. Some entrants were having treatment that will never stop.
Breast cancer treatment is brutal: surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, hormone suppression, hair loss, breast loss, fertility loss, nerve damage, lifelong mental and physical pain, injuries and disabilities. It would be understandable to give up on sport after all of this. But these women have not. They have stepped up to the challenge.
They carried with them some amazing life stories: women who were given a 5% chance of survival, solo mums who had to work through treatment, women diagnosed while pregnant, and women who had been knocked down many times but had continued to get back up.
One such woman was Christina from the US, diagnosed in her early thirties when she was six months pregnant. She had undergone gruelling treatment, including beginning chemotherapy while still expecting. Four years later, she had come all the way to New Zealand with her husband and two children. The baby she had undergone chemotherapy with while pregnant is now a gorgeous and healthy 31/2-year-old, cheering her mum on from the sidelines.
Dragon boating is thousands of years old, but the benefits it holds for breast cancer survivors have been realised only relatively recently. In the late 1990s, Canadian sports medicine physician Donald McKenzie challenged the prevailing thinking that breast cancer survivors should refrain from vigorous upper-body exercise. He taught a group of survivors how to dragon boat, then followed their progress (the Abreast in a Boat project).
As well as finding physical benefits, McKenzie found there were also significant social ones. As he wrote in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 1998: “It reaches out to other women and offers them a message of hope and support. It is helping to change attitudes towards ‘life after breast cancer’ and it encourages women to lead full and active lives. It is making a difference.”
There are now more than 300 breast cancer dragon boating crews in 37 countries and six continents. At Karapiro, more than 2000 of those paddlers came together to connect, to compete, to remember paddlers and loved ones gone, and to realise the joy of life. Even in the face of adversity – or maybe because of it.
If you are looking for sporting inspiration, look no further.
