Is our Regatta dying?

There is only one reason for the delay in coming up with this very personal reaction to the holding of our annual National September 8 Regatta - I simply wanted to let the anger subside before I put pen to paper and this in fairness to both the organisers and the readers. But I doubt if I have let off enough steam to hide the pain and the frustration felt at watching what could possibly have been the death throes of an old traditional, historical and sporting event.

There is no other way one could justify the dramatic drop in attendance so obvious last September 8 and the half-hearted programme of events that in one particular case included a race restricted to just three boats, unheard of in the recent history of the Regatta. There was a time when the course was not wide enough to take the subscribed 12 entries!

Not only has the Regatta lost its renowned splendour as a colourful and enthusiasm-filled event on the sporting calendar but it has been left to disintegrate into a hotchpotch of disorganised races where some of the crews even refuse to follow the most elementary of requisites - the donning of uniform colours on the same boat.

Not a single accusing finger should be pointed at the hard-working committee men in the participating districts of Cospicua, Senglea, Kalkara, Vittoriosa, Marsamxett and Marsa, or at the bedraggled rowers themselves.

The Regatta was for a long time even an elegant event, at least on the official side at what used to be the Customs House area. While rival crews may have annually chosen to exchange expletives and flying oars on the sea, at Customs House people were sitting in the shade where they were being served lemonade and ice-creams, they could follow the official printed programme, fill in the points schedule according to the information being provided in the official commentary and generally look forward to watching the trophies and coveted Aggregate Shield being presented to both happy and disgruntled rowers and committee men.

First introduced by the British, this elegance persisted for many years after independence. Sadly, the new millennium has brought a rude awakening.

The Regatta has enough problems as it is, what with the dwindling number of master boat-builders and soaring expenses. Crews have become too expensive to create and to sustain and there seems to be a blatant disinclination on the part of the authorities to help other than throwing in a few small prizes and a few hapless civil servants. Recent years have shown that Labour governments tend to offer a better service than Nationalist ones which may unjustly look upon the Regatta as nothing more than a donkey race the likes of which take place in various villages and towns of Malta and Gozo.

But the September 8 Regatta deserves a lot more than this. It should have grown into a major tourist attraction but it is to date more of a tourist downer than anything else. Last September 8, I had to witness the pitiful sight of scores of disappointed tourists actually leaving once they realised they could absolutely make no head or tails of what was going on.

There was no proper commentary and what was heard on the public address system was a bundle of words in Maltese intended solely for the ears of committee men and district delegates. The gap between one race and another on the programme seems to be getting broader each year. Imagine the poor tourist who does not know anything about the Regatta, is unaware of the traditional rivalries and local sensitivities and is kept completely in the dark as to what is happening out there on the water - there was only one solution for him: get the hell out of there.

I remember particular years when the sometimes unavoidable gaps between races were filled with live band marches from the Armed Forces, water spectacles such as skiing events, synchronised swimming and carnival floats as well as on-the-spot interviews with veteran rowers, record holders and efficient organisers seeking to calm down the huge, impatient crowds.

This time round, if you were anywhere near, the only music to be heard was canned and coming from some hidden source at Customs House. At one moment I was both pleasantly surprised and amused by the music being played: it was the Internationale, that famous socialist hymn which somebody must have played totally oblivious to what it is and what it means at this chaotic time of unsuccessful privatisation processes, soaring unemployment and bizarre restructuring exercises!

There are many other Regattas in the world and not a single one of them is threatened with extinction. On the contrary, they have been upgraded into real sporting events without their being bereft of traditional and historical values. The Venice Regatta is one such success story. The tourists rush to it and the organisers dip millions into it while the rowers from the rival districts have lost none of their enthusiasm for the sport for it is indeed a sport that requires dedication and supreme physical fitness.

Why are we letting our own Regatta, so replete with history and tradition, to die such an ignominious death? Is it because it has always been more or less attached to the hearts of people in the Cottonera and its Grand Harbour surroundings? One hopes not. One hopes it is just a passing phase, one that is identical to the crisis that had enveloped the Regatta in the mid-1960s, again under a Nationalist government, before we, as young journalists, helped bring it back to the fore.

Even compared to last year's disastrous Regatta, when the prizes and the Shield itself were thrown into the sea by irate supporters who, in the first place, should not have been inside the Customs House area, with the helpless police watching and too obviously scared to do anything against the shirtless, tattooed men with ministry passes stuck to their nipples, last September 8 seemed more like a funeral to a dead event.

Resuscitation may still be possible. There should be no doubt about the willingness on the part of the various Regatta clubs and the association that represents them and what familiar warts that the event has had since its very inception by the Knights cannot deny it the rightful recognition as both a proud national event and a major tourist attraction.

Hailing from Kalkara, where many a British naval commander resided in the past, I can vouch for the Regatta's attraction to foreigners. At the Kalkara club we often had the pleasure of greeting them and showing them around the place. The graceful dghajsa was a source of awe for them as were the heavy oars, the strong and able-bodied rowers just back from their two-hour training sessions and the trophies collection. I cannot see why it should be any different today if we get the tourists interested, if we organise proper excursions for them, if we feed them the right kind of information, if we let them enjoy it, if we seek to give the Regatta a new lease of life. Before it is too late.