One last chance for Olympic cash... I mean gold

I've lost my brief interest in badminton. We had such high hopes for dear Ronaldo to win the $1m bribe prize and bring Singapore a gold medal. After a brilliant bashing of the 1st seed in the first round of the tourney, he walked over some big white german in the second round but then completely choke in in a 15-10, 15-1 defeat to some guy from Thailand - a country whose athletic fame comes from transexual volleyball players and kickboxers. What a let down.

But all is not lost! There's still one medal contender left. Li Jia Wei has made it through to the semi-finals of the women's table tennis. It's a little harder to get excited because she's obviously a Chinese import. OK so Susilo is obviously an Indonesian import but at least he speaks English which makes him sound kinda, like, sorta, just a tiny bit Singaporean (yes world - they speak English in Singapore despite that funny accent). But if truth be told, Susilo only got citizenship in 2002 whereas Jia Wei has been toughing it out since 1996. That means she's been here since before the Esplanade and the convenience of underground shopping at City Link Mall. The woman is a trooper.

It may seem a bit embarrassing to have to buy in talent this way but given how the home grown athletes have done (dead last in all the swimming heats but it's possible they were held back by their water wings) there's no choice really. Every child from a third world country now has the hope of growing up to be a Singaporean with the opportunity to with $250,000, $500,000 or even $1,000,000!!! for Bronze, Silver and Gold contributions to the country's Olympic record. The fund is well stocked as apparently the last medal win for Singapore was in 1963 but given Singapore was part of Malaysia until 1965 I'm not sure it counts.

Anyway, for the next 48 hours I'm a die hard ping pong fan. This is more exciting than the lottery.

Labels: singapore

Friday, August 20, 2004