A team of cancer survivors has paddled their way to not one, not two, but three gold medals at a dragon boat racing world championship in Italy.
Twenty-three local paddlers represented the Central Coast SurviveOars at the Club Crew World Championship. At the competition, there were a total of 7,000 paddlers from 50 different countries.
“You line up and you get into your race position, and you hold the boat, and they have the starting gun. It's intense. We really just locked in and focused and that helped us to be successful,” said Shannon Larrabee, paddler.
Before competing in Italy, the team knew they had a lot of work to do.
“We were practicing several times a week. I was out in the water five times a week. We really took up our fitness so a lot of us were doing workouts outside of the water,” Larrabee said.
The group competed in the all-cancer division. And all that work they put into the team and themselves paid off.
“We won a gold medal in the 2000 meters, 200 meters and 500 meters in our division and that was really exciting,” Larrabee said.
One teammate who was set to travel to Italy with them passed away a few weeks prior to the competition. To honor their friend, the group handed out stickers and posted stickers of her all over Italy.
“We were carrying with us in our hearts, our teammate Robin O’Connor, who wasn’t able to join us, and we kept her really close to us throughout the whole event,” Larrabee said.
The paddlers say they have found so many positive things to come out of dragon boat racing.
“It’s friendship, fitness, beauty, nature, and goals. There’s a place for everybody in dragon boating so we welcome anybody to come and join us,” said paddler Laurie Lackland.
The next Club Crew World Championships will be in 2026 and the dragon boat paddlers say they hope to prepare and qualify for that by having their daily practices out in the bay.
For more information on the Central Coast Dragon Boat Association, click here.
