Racing amongst gods

The race culture geok and i have been brought up in is one of kiasu-ism.

Make sure everything's in order, go early and make sure you are ready to set off anytime. And so on the first day of the races, geok and i wake up bright and early. the team was supposed to meet at 830am.

Geok and i were up at 715 and were sitting at the breakfast by 730 chomping down our buffet breakfast (which by the way totally loses hands down to the penang breakfast at bayview hotel).
745...
800...
815...

not a single soul from our team had turned up at the breakfast area... by then, the local teams had already long started to stream in, warm up, go for their runs along the beach. and for our team, it was only geok and i. no doubt the rest must have been tired from all that bar hopping the night before... tsk tsk...

much later, we all make our way to the beach and locate our tent.

as usual, with races, there's alot of hanging around, waiting for your event to swing by. so most of us hit the waters for a dip... exactly how crystal clear is the water??

the water by the shore's pretty shallow, which allows for the tonnes of spectators/participants to wade all the way out near the bouys to actually watch the races. With the few exception of a few roaming too far out and till the commentator had to scream for them to get out of the traffic path of the boats...You can imagine if it were spore, the race officials would probably bring on the police to hurl the people out of the sea.

getting to wade out into the water also meant more picsssss!!!!!







Our races came and went. and as expected, we were last in our heats, as well as reprecharge.

the up side of it all, was that we got to end the day early, watch the races and sit back and sip on our milkshakes!!!

My very first glass of Mango Milkshake which got me hooked like a crack addict after.
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Day 2 of the races were pretty much the same. more sitting around, soaking in the water, working on the tan which by now had gone really bad, and oh yah, racing.

as with the first day, we were knocked out by the reprecharge. aside from the fact that the local teams are damn good, geok and i have deeply analysed why "the teams we now train with" will never win, the simple reason lies with the fact that they suffer from the "there are more doctors than there are patients in the team" syndrome. it seems to be the trend with ang mohs, too many people have too much things to say, everyone wants to be the boss and no one wants to listen. which is really a pity, coz even if they do have the potential, it's screwed by the fact that people don't get it that there's a reason why there's only 1 coach or 1 captain.

Of course the biggest stars of the show was the Philippines National Womens' Team, who totally charged ahead of the rest of the pack. Geok and i watched every race they were in and kept raving about how great the Philippine National Team is, ok, more like i was behaving like a crazed idiot going ga-ga over the Philippine National Team. Apparently it seemed like we were the only bo-zos who were star struck by the SEA Games Gold Medalists.

Not surprisingly, the national team came in first for all the races. but at the end of it all, they very graciously gave up their gold medals coz they were there to participate, and so those teams which came in 2nd, 3rd and 4th naturally got their golds, silvers and bronzes. a gesture which won a standing ovation from the rest of the teams at the dinner the following night...awwwww... more brownie points for their sportsmanship.

Camsur emerged as the men's champs. Local fishermen of the island, watching them race was like watching a race video on fast forward mode, coz their stroke rate is just sky rockets and leaves the rest of the pack eating their backwash... once again, geok and i almost lost our minds over being in the presence of gods...

At the end of 2 days of racing, it's triple thumbs up for the Boracay Races. Unlike the Penang races which are turning into another singapore race coz of the excessive numbers of singaporean teams participating, Boracay was definately an eye-opener getting to watch how other teams race. And of course having found our new idol teams... :)