Club Crew World Championships (CCWC) Ravenna, Italy 2024
Submitted by Meri Gibson, IBCPC President
After leaving the outreach clinic in Croatia, I travelled to Ravenna, Italy for the IDBF Club Crew World Championships (CCWC). This event saw the biggest number of athletes competing at any CCWC with 6500 athletes in attendance. We also saw the biggest number of breast cancer crews enter, competing in both standard and small boat teams. The site every day saw a mass influx of athletes as they participated in heats and finals.
I was truly fortunate to spend a great deal of time moving around the site, meeting with breast cancer survivors and watching the racing. I was lucky to be at protocol which meant that I could present the medals to the winners in the breast cancer categories. Whilst in this area I was consulting very closely with the announcers and had the privilege of being able to commentate particularly on the breast cancer races to give some background knowledge and history about our participation in the sport and in those teams that were paddling at this event.
As we keep saying at IBCPC, breast cancer dragon boat paddling is about participation first and foremost, but we totally acknowledge that there are many teams who want to progressively move towards championship paddling at various events. We have encouraged this because it is a great showcase to members of the public what we can achieve by embracing our journey, by embracing this adventure of dragon boat paddling, and showing what an incredible life, we can have. We prove how strong we are, we prove that “Exercise is medicine”.
Following the closing ceremony we had the IDBF Congress. As the IBCPC representative on the IDBF council and as an associate vice president I was able to present a competition rule change to further include our breast cancer survivor paddlers, but also to align with the policy that we have for our IBCPC festivals. The proposal received applause, there were no questions and it was unanimously approved.
My congratulations to everyone that competed at the event, to the organisers for pulling off a major coup in terms of the number of paddlers present, and to every single person who gave absolutely everything physically, financially, and emotionally to be a part of this event.
