Local or not?

Been watching the Olympics alot during my 3wks leave, more than I ever watched as compared to the past few games, perhaps I have nothing to do den to watch tv perhaps the only they keep showing now are the various competitions, none the less, its quite entertaining..

But I do only watch certain sports,swimming, table tennis, badmintion, diving, weight lifting and gymnastics, dun ask why but I dun watch the others.

Was catching the live telecast of the men's single badminton gold medal game the other day. Competitors are Lee Chong Wei from Msia and Lin Dan from China. It was an intense game, I was cheering for Lee, afterall, China had always had a clean sweep in badminton, having Lee winning this will prove to the world that not only the Chinese can trained an Olympic gold medalist.

But things were not meant to be, Lee Lost to Lin after a tough battle, I had initally tot he could win in the last game and made history. He put up a great fight too, you can see tat even Lin was in respect of him, hugging him after the win instead of the usual handshake.

This set me thinking bout Singapore's policy of importing sportsmen and women from other country to compete in our national flag. No doubt, we had won 2 bronzes this time, I had great admiration for our table tennis team. But it would be a prouder moment had this been a true blue Singaporean who had won.

Dun get me wrong, its not that I deny the sportswomen the effort they put in to train for the games, afterall, many countries aso filed China born players in their team and only Singapore is able to win the bronze. I mean if every China born player is playing that well, then their teams would have made it to the top 3 too. We cannot deny the hard work our players put in.

But wat I dun get it is, why didnt Singapore train their own players? We can have a mixture of local and foreign born players in a team, exposing our players to these big events, instead all of the players filed are all non local. In this way, how can a local player grow when he or she is being denied of this chance to go to bigger events?

In the case of Lee, who is a malaysian chinese, was being termed as a national hero after this win. You see, it is not easy to shine as a Chinese in Malaysia, but he did it and went on to represent his country in the international stage, even his coach, I see was a local (Malay and chinese coach). So obviously, it made all Malaysians prouder than ever to be able to win Silver, only losing to Lin who is well known as world best..

Even as a Singaporean, I felt happie for them, this is the moment that I wished I had a chance to see. Even our national flag flying up high there, medals won by a local and if possible coached by a local. This is the time when the government can proudly claimed that they had succeed in bring the standard of our sportsmen or women to international level. Before that, even our national flag is being flew at the victory ceremony, I can never felt a sense of great acheivement for them.