Chandigarh, 1989
In the autumn of 1989, my father and mother represented the Philippines at the 3rd Asian Rowing Championships, held at the Lake Sports Complex on Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh, India. The 2.17-kilometer rowing channel — at the time the longest in Asia, built specifically for the championship — had been carved out of the lake at the foot of the Shivalik Hills. Crews came from across the continent. The Philippines sent two athletes: Eric McGaw and Elena McGaw, husband and wife.
They had come to race singles. Each alone in their own boat, in their own event, under their own country's flag. The Philippines did not have a national rowing program that could field a team in 1989 — there was no training center, no full-time coaching, no pipeline of junior development. There was a small number of dedicated club rowers and the occasional husband-and-wife who decided to represent their country anyway. My parents had been racing out of the Manila Boat Club through the 1980s. The shell they often raced in together back home was called E&E, painted with their initials. By 1989 they had been on the water in one form or another for most of their married life.
I was six years old. We had moved to Hyderabad earlier that year for my father's new job at ICRISAT, the international agricultural research center. India was still new to all of us. Chandigarh was a long way north of where we lived, and I had never been there. My memory of the trip is a child's memory — fragments, mostly, and what survives in our family video.
The opening ceremony
On November 1, 1989, a young Indian girl in a school uniform and braids carried a placard reading PHILIPPINES through the opening parade of nations. The placard had a stylized silhouette of a rower printed on its left side. A young woman in a saree walked beside her, escorting the placard-bearer through the procession. The schoolgirl had probably been recruited from a Chandigarh school for the event. She likely had no idea who or what she was carrying the sign for. The two-person Philippine delegation followed somewhere behind her.
The racing
Competition ran through the first week of November. On November 4, my father raced the men's single sculls. He wore a white singlet with PHILIPPINES across the back in dark green letters and a white peaked cap against the Indian sun. The video shows him in his stroke, the long racing shell beneath him, the outriggers extended on either side like wings, alone on the water with an umpire launch shadowing alongside. I don't know exactly how he finished. I don't think he won.
My mother raced the women's single sculls. The footage of her shows her on the lake with her boat, the water flat and gray, the far bank barely visible through the morning mist for which Sukhna Lake is well known in November. The Shivalik foothills rose beyond. She was alone in the frame — one woman with one boat at a continental championship.
The Philippines did not have the resources, the program depth, or the talent pipeline of the established Asian rowing powers. My parents knew that before they ever pushed off from the dock. They went anyway. They raced. They finished. The Philippine flag was on the water at the 1989 Asian Rowing Championships because they put it there.
The men's quadruple sculls final
On November 5, the final day of competition, my father turned his camera onto the men's quadruple sculls final. Three crews contested the race. A yellow boat won by several lengths — possibly Hong Kong, possibly another country whose colors we couldn't identify from the video. North Korea took silver in a very close finish at the line, just ahead of South Korea, who took bronze. The Shivalik Hills hung in the background of every shot. Two halves of a divided peninsula raced for second and third place, less than a year after Seoul had hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics that North Korea had boycotted. No one filming or watching from the bank would have remarked on the politics. The boats just raced.
My parents had finished their own racing. They stayed to watch the medal events.
The closing ceremony
The closing ceremony was held on the same day at the edge of the lake. A platform had been built at the water's edge. Roughly twenty athletes lined up across it — the medalists from across the championship's events, gathered together for the formal close. A woman in a pink saree stood at the center, a dignitary presenting medals. The Shivalik foothills sat behind everything. The afternoon sun was bright. Some of the athletes shielded their eyes. The whole ceremony had the quality of a real event taking place at a real moment in real time, not staged for cameras — a regional continental championship coming to its end on a lake in northern India.
The documentary absence
The internet does not remember the 1989 Asian Rowing Championships in any detail. The Wikipedia entry on Sukhna Lake mentions the championship took place there. The Chandigarh Sports Department website confirms the venue. The Asian Rowing Federation's current website lists Vietnam 2025 as the 23rd edition of the championships, which makes 1989 plausibly the 8th or 9th. Beyond that, there are no race results online. No medal tables. No participating nations list. No surviving photographs from the event that I can find anywhere on the public web.
The championship happened. It is documented at the framework level — that it took place, where, roughly when. The specifics — who raced, who won, who came in last — exist now only in the memories of the people who were there and in the unindexed archives of national rowing federations and old newspaper morgues.
What survives
What survives in my family is a single VHS tape. My father held the camera through most of those five days in Chandigarh. The opening ceremony with the schoolgirl carrying the placard. My mother on the water with her boat. The men's quad final. The close North-South Korean finish at the line. The medal ceremony at the edge of the lake with the Shivalik Hills behind. The one image of my father racing — wearing PHILIPPINES across his back, alone on the water in the gray November light — must have been filmed by my mother. The two of them made the record together. Each filmed the other on the only days their country's name appeared on a lake in India.
Most of the tape is not the championship. Most of it is footage of me and my brother — six and three at the time — playing in whatever room or hotel or garden the camera found us in. The Chandigarh racing clips are only a few minutes out of a much longer tape. My father went to India to row for the Philippines, and he filmed enough of the racing to remember. He filmed his sons everything else. I don't think this was a choice he was conscious of making. It was the camera in his hand, and he turned it to whichever direction his attention went. His attention mostly went to us.
He died in 2016. The tape survived him. Four continents, several moves, three and a half decades. I now hold it as a digital file.
Notes on sources
The framework details in this article are confirmed in public sources: the Chandigarh Administration Sports Department, the Wikipedia entry on Sukhna Lake, the Asian Rowing Confederation's historical record, and the Morni Hills tourism site, which describes the rowing channel as "2.17 KM long, 62.5 m wide and 3 m deep" and built in 1989 for the championship. Everything else — the Philippine participation, the racing, the result of the men's quad final, the closing ceremony, the existence of my parents on the water at Sukhna Lake on those specific days — is documented in the family video. The video is the only known record of these specifics that survives in any indexed form.
If you were there — if you raced at the 3rd Asian Rowing Championships in Chandigarh, or if you have photographs, programs, footage, or memories from the event — we would love to hear from you. Reach out at [email protected].
