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VANCOUVER, June 21 -- Thousands of paddlers from around North America were piloting during the 26th annual Dragon Boat Festival in Vancouver Saturday, which attracted more than 100,000 spectators.

The event started in the 1980s when members of the local Chinese cultural center arranged the race inspired by 2,000-year-old myths from southern China.

To coincide with Vancouver's World Expo in 1986, organizers brought six antique dragon boats to Vancouver from Hong Kong. The annual festival was launched three years later and has been growing ever since.

Anita Webster, a Festival spokeswoman, told Xinhua that the event started on Friday and ends on Sunday, with 180 teams and 5,000 participant paddlers.

"That's the same number of athletes that competed at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, as a matter of fact. So it's a really big event from that point of view," she said.

Webster said the race was an exciting show of wisdom and strength. Many of the teams were very competitive and even train for the event during the off-season. The races are arranged into competitive and recreational brackets with many of the teams raising funds for charities and other causes.

Eight boats can race at once in the 500-meter-long course. Each boat has 20 paddlers, plus a drummer and a steering person. Some of the best teams can travel at three-to-four meters per second.

Among these teams, one is particularly shining as the paddlers are visually impaired persons. The Eye of the Dragon team has participated in the event for the past 20 years.

The disabled paddlers were matched with sighted teammates for tasks such as getting in and out of the boat, but once they were in the boat, they did not need to see, said Liz Charyna, a sighted member of the team who has been paddling with Eye of the Dragon for 14 years. It has also inspired other disabled teams to join the festival.

"We're a competitive team. It's an exciting opportunity to participate together, and we compete with the competitive teams. sometimes we could even won the race," Charyna said.

Weather conditions were sunny and calm for Eye of the Dragon's first race on Saturday. The visually impaired team captain David Brun said the race went well enough, but the team had a lot of nervous energy and used up a lot of power at the beginning of their race.

The key for the blind paddlers was to time their strokes to the feeling of the boat's surges, Brun says. In many ways, they were more in tune with each other because they were using their other senses.

Another team, the Dragon Boat, is a senior team as all the members are over the age of 55, with the average age of 63 years old. Team captain Terry Linden said their first race of the weekend went well as they clocked a time of two minutes and 17 seconds.

"We love connecting with people from all over North America that are here, and of course just being here with our team, especially in good weather like this, is wonderful," he said.