dragon boat festival

Dragon boat racing is a sport that’s 2,000 years old, and it’s coming back to Denver at the annual Colorado Dragon Boat Festival July 19-20 at Sloan’s Lake Park. There were an estimated 115,000 attendees at the festival last year, and organizers are anticipating 125,000 for 2014 — much more than the original 15,000 that attended the first festival in 2001, said Gil Asakawa, chair of the media committee. Although the festival is named after the dragon boat races, it’s also a celebration of traditional and contemporary Asian cultures, of which there are nearly 50 distinct ethnicities, said executive director Erin Yoshimura. “They all vary in food, clothing, language, culture and tradition,” Yoshimura said. “So we really want to bring together people ...