02/09/2026
An incredible read! Thankyou to Melissa who spoke at the IBCPC Participatory Dragon Boat Festival 2026 - this is her edited speech.
I was invited to speak at the 2026 Congress in France as part of the 2026 IBCPC Participatory Dragon Boat Festival, France. I didn’t tell many people and wasn’t planning to share but many people told me how meaningful it was for them and hoped I would post my speech.
So here it is in the full version. I shaved off some for the sake of time at the Congress…
Before I begin, I need to say thank you. I am so honored, and so humbled, to be standing here as a speaker at this Congress. And I owe that to my friend, Meri Gibson.
Meri and I met through a podcast interview I did a while back, for a show I hosted called Behind the Pink Ribbon. What began as one conversation turned into a friendship that I now consider one of my dearest. What I truly admire is that Meri has spent her energy establishing breast cancer teams all over the world for a sport that she initially had no interest in at all and she has been one of the fiercest advocates for including our division at every level of competition, not just at the participatory level. Her conviction is simple: everyone — woman or man, anyone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer — has the right to be out there paddling. Not some of us. Everyone.
Meri also shared something we talk about often: for many of those attending an IBCPC event, it could be their last. So we owe it to them — every single one of them — to make it extraordinary.
While hosting my podcast, I also got to interview Dr. Don McKenzie — the man whose research created this entire movement, who proved women recovering from breast cancer could be strong athletes, not fragile patients. He talked about dragon boating as a way to take back your life, on your own terms.
We also talked about the numbers behind what so many of us already feel in our bodies. Exercise is medicine, and it should be standard of care. Physical activity is associated with a 35 to 40 percent increase in survivorship. That's not a nice side benefit of paddling with your teammates — that's a survival statistic.
But here's what moved me most: Dr. McKenzie told me it wasn't the data that turned his research project into a global movement. It was the joy. The love. The camaraderie. People kept showing up not because a doctor recommended it, but because they had found something in that boat they couldn't find anywhere else. That's why there always has to be a place in the boat for whoever needs it.
Two very different conversations, but they left me with the same reminder: this sport changes the trajectory of a person's entire life after a breast cancer diagnosis. Sometimes, it saves it.
I want to tell you how I learned that for myself.
When I was in kindergarten, I dressed up as Underdog for Halloween. I won the costume contest. I remember feeling like the biggest deal in the world — Underdog was this tiny cartoon dog who wasn't strong, wasn't fast, wasn't anybody's first pick, but he put on a cape anyway and saved the day.
I didn't know it then, but that costume was going to become the truest thing anyone ever said about me.
Because here's the reality: I was never an athlete. I was always the smallest kid in the room — no natural talent for anything with a ball, a track, or a stopwatch. If you had told sixteen-year-old me that one day I'd be racing for Team USA, I would have laughed you out of the gym.
In 2007, at 31 years old, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Everyone in this room knows what that sentence holds. It's not just a diagnosis. It's a rearrangement of your entire identity. One day you have a future you assume is guaranteed, and the next day you are a patient, a statistic, a body being treated instead of a person living their life.
In 2008, while I was still in the middle of my treatments, I found a dragon boat team, Pink Steel, in Pittsburgh. I showed up and waited — I wasn't cleared to compete yet. Radiation had damaged my reconstruction, and I opted to undergo a latissimus dorsi flap procedure to rebuild my right breast. If you are not familiar with that procedure, they removed the entire lat muscle on the right side of my back to reconstruct my breast.
In 2009, I finally got in that boat and paddled for the first time.
For someone who'd spent her whole life believing she wasn't the athletic type, that mattered. For the first time, my body wasn't just the thing that had betrayed me with a diagnosis. It was the thing that pulled a paddle through water with nineteen women who understood exactly what I had been through without me having to explain a single word of it.
Dragon boating didn't just give me exercise. It gave me back a body I could trust again. It gave me a team. It gave me a reason to be strong for something other than survival.
My coach at the time taught me something I didn't know I needed to hear: that I was more than a cancer survivor; I was an athlete. I didn't believe her at first. I didn’t believe it for a long time. It took years before I could say it about myself without flinching.
In 2014, Pink Steel participated in the Sarasota IBCPC Festival and we ranked 2nd in the world. I never had any kind of athletic achievement in my life. I truly believed at that point, I was, I am an athlete.
In 2015, I moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and became the coach for the Phoenix Desert Dragons in 2016. I wanted to help others see in themselves what my coach saw in me.
I thought the chapter of my medical story was closed — something that happened to me, in the past tense.
What I didn't know- what I refused to know, honestly – was that having the latissimus dorsi flap procedure back in 2008 had done something else. It had qualified me as a person with a physical disability.
My husband was the one who said it to me. He said, "You know you have a disability, right?" And I said no. No, I don't. I paddle. I coach. I am strong. Those words — disability, para-dragon, para-athlete — did not feel like they belonged to me. I had spent so many years clawing my way from "not athletic" to "athlete" that I could not accept a word that felt like it was being taken back away from me.
It took me time to understand it wasn't taking anything away. My power production is significantly reduced because of that missing latissimus muscle — that's simply true. Once I stopped arguing with the truth, a door opened instead of closing.
In 2023, I was selected and competed for Team USA in Thailand — as a paddler and a drummer, on the first-ever paradragon team to compete at that level of international competition. As the drummer, I call races both verbally and in American Sign Language, because the beat of a dragon boat should never depend on which of your senses works the way someone else's does. I competed in 21 out of 22 races.
We did not medal.
In 2025, I represented Team USA again in Germany, as a drummer, with the full paradragon crew. That crew did not medal either.
I tell you that on purpose.
Because I want you to understand that this isn't coming from someone standing on a podium with a medal around her neck. It's coming from someone who has learned that being part of history simply by being in that boat mattered every bit to me as much as standing on a podium.
The kid in the Underdog costume would not have believed any of this.
I have now lived this from different seats in the boat. As a breast cancer patient who waited for her turn to paddle. As an athlete who found strength she never had before her diagnosis, let alone after it. As a paradragon, who had to be told the truth about her own body before she could use it to represent her country.
And still one of the most important, in my mind — as a coach.
That seat carries a responsibility I don't take lightly. Every single person who walks up to our boats — nervous, scared, newly diagnosed, differently abled, or simply convinced they could never be athletic — deserves a seat that was always theirs.
Some of them, like me, have no idea they are more than they think they are, and need a partner, a teammate, a coach, to gently tell them the truth before they believe it themselves. And some have never once in their life been picked for a team — this time, they already have been.
We are not just running practices and building lineups. We are, quite literally, in a position to save a life, or change one — sometimes both at once, and sometimes without ever knowing it happened.
I was the underdog in kindergarten, the underdog athletically, the underdog with a diagnosis in 2007, and the underdog with a missing latissimus muscle who didn't know what she qualified for. And I got in the boat anyway, with a paddle or a drum stick in my hand, wearing my country's colors.
So to every coach, every captain, every leader in this room: look at the person hesitating on the dock. Look at the person who says "I've never been an athlete." Look at the person who doesn't yet know what their body is capable of.
Give them the seat. Give them the cape.
You might just be looking at the next Underdog.
Melissa Adams
