Mercedes-Benz Around the Island Feature | Mercedes-Benz Around the Island Race 2021 – Coastal Rowing The Mercedes-Benz Around the Island Race 2021 – Coastal Rowing, co-organised by the Hong Kong, China Rowing Association was held on 21 and 28 November 2021. Due to a surge in demand to enter this iconic race but a limited number of boats available, Club management decided to run the race over two weekends. The separation was made between the ‘Iron’ crews and the ‘Relay’ crews with Iron competitors racing the full course on the first weekend. In total, 33 crews entered the race with 181 athletes competing.
his section is a mixture of articles to give a wide range of coverage of both weekends. Therefore, what better place to start than with an article written by Club member Mark Savelli who raced on both weekends.
Double Trouble – Racing ATIR twice in a week! Words: Mark Savelli | Image: Stanley Lam
Having set store on rowing only a speedy ‘half’ course this year (18km half), we formed the Gin and Tonic Team comprising (stroke) Michael Ng, Charles Tsai, Jimmy Chan and Mark Savelli with cox Amy Fu. And the idea was to work in non-adversarial partnership with another team (Gin Galaxy) of able rowers for the long half (27km); (Raymond Lau, Iris Leung, Lam Chan, Frederice Bombeck and coxed by Kira Rimrott). That said, we seemed to spend most of months of race preparation time in straight competition with Raymond’s crew who were always demanding ‘side by side’ sprint races between the two boats. After streams of messages aimed at getting all the ducks in a row, I think, at best, we raced side by side on only one occasion. And the results were of course
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| MARCH 2022 AHOY!
