Straits Times, Singapore
Aug 24 2008
The Olympic passport
The number of foreign-born athletes competing in the Games has raised
eyebrows. But in a borderless world, why shouldn’t sports be just as
globalised?
By Tan Dawn Wei, expat eye
This year’s Olympic table tennis matches will be remembered as much
for some formidable play as a battle amojng the Chinese.
That’s the Chinese-Singaporean, Chinese-French, Chinese-Austrian,
Chinese-American, Chinese-Spaniard, Chinese-Australian, Chinese-
German, Chinese-Polish, Chinese Canadian, Chinese-Korean, Chinese-Hong
Konger, Chinese-Luxembourger, Chinese-Dutch, Chinese- Dominican,
Chinese-Croatian and Chinese-Congolese.
The oft-bandied phrase, ‘the Chinese are everywhere’, is nothing if
not glaringly apparent at the Beijing table tennis games.
Of the 78 women paddlers at this year’s Olympics, 35 are China-
born. Only three wear China’s red and yellow colours.
Past Olympic Games have borne witness to such ironic scenes before,
but quite possibly none more than in the Chinese capital.
And it’s not just at the ping-pong table.
When the members of the press descended on Chaoyang Park for what they
thought would be a politically charged beach volleyball match between
Georgia and Russia after the latter sent tanks into the former’s
territory, they saw none of that from the Brazilian players
representing Georgia.
Then, there were the New Zealand-born triathlete brothers who competed
against each other: one, Shane Reed, doing it for his home country,
the other, Matt, for the United States.
Armenian wrestler Ara Abrahamian won a bronze medal for Sweden (which
he was later stripped of for throwing it on the mat); Jamaican
Germaine Mason gave Great Britain a silver and its first high-jump
medal since 1996; and Moroccan Rashid Ramzi ran to a gold in the
1,500m race for Bahrain.
Of course, the table tennis trio of Li Jiawei, Wang Yuegu and Feng
Tianwei – former Chinese, now Singaporeans – broke this country’s dry
Olympic medal spell of 48 years with a team silver.
The United States also fielded a brigade of migrants – 36 from 28
countries – this year: among them, Lopez Lomong, the Sudanese-born
American flag-bearer at the opening ceremony, plus a South
African-born tennis player, a Georgian archer, a Polish kayaker,
Chinese table tennis players and a world champion Kenyan distance
runner.
All this trading of nationalities has led to much criticism and
derision from purists, stakeholders and even the International Olympic
Committee (IOC).
It is one thing to find a new home as a conventional migrant, but
another to be bought over purely for your athletic talents.
No one raised a stink when Nastia Liukin, a Russian immigrant, won a
gold medal in individual all-round gymnastics for the US a week ago.
She had moved to New Orleans when she was 2 1/2 years old with her
family after the Soviet Union broke up and is as American as apple
pie.
But Americans have been far less kind to two other of its basketball
players who crossed over from the US to Russia.
Becky Hammon and J.R. Holden have had to defend themselves repeatedly
from being labelled ‘traitors’ when they donned Russian colours at
this year’s Games.
Hammon, who wasn’t drafted into the US national team, had said: ‘I
still love my country – it doesn’t really have anything to do with
that. I just want to play basketball.’
The Olympics, it seems, are no longer about patriotism, national
identity or making your motherland proud.
Instead, it has become what The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer
Jeff Schultz calls ‘an exercise in passport free agency’.
Fingers have been wagging in the direction of rich Middle Eastern
countries, which have thrown wads of cash at poor African athletes in
a bid for national glory.
Former world steeplechase champion Stephen Cherono, who traded his
Kenyan jersey for a Qatari one and adopted a new name, Saif Saaeed
Shaheen, for a lifetime salary of US$1,000 (S$1,400) a month, is just
one of them.
There have been enough cases of Cheronos to make the IOC take action:
It ruled in 2002 that athletes must wait three years from receiving
their new citizenship papers before they can compete for their
adoptive country – unless their home country waives this deadline.
IOC president Jacques Rogge said the committee introduced the rule to
prevent athletes from ‘changing nationality for purely financial
reasons’.
‘It is a worrying situation emerging in sport,’ he had remarked.
Likewise, the International Table Tennis Federation has also put its
foot down. After the Olympics, those over the age of 21 will be banned
from pledging allegiance to another country.
Those between 18 and 20 will have to wait seven years before they can
make the jump.
Other sports federations are also likely to follow suit.
But there is something to be said about this globalisation of sports.
When the world is increasingly becoming a borderless one, why should
the field of sports be any different? When people have traditionally
migrated in search of a better life, more equitable opportunities and
greater challenges, why can’t sportsmen do the same?
Lawyer and economist Ian Ayres argued for flexibility in a New York
Times column last Thursday, citing Article 6 in the Olympic Charter
which states that the Games are competitions between athletes and not
countries.
‘Imagine a world where the best athletes are able to compete. This is
definitely not the current Olympic system. The country quota system
keeps many of the best athletes home,’ he wrote.
‘Letting athletes choose their national teams is a simple way of
fulfilling this powerful idea,’ he said of the Olympic Charter.
If not for Singapore’s Foreign Sports Talent (FST) scheme, introduced
in 1993 to fast-track promising foreign athletes to Singapore
citizenship, the Republic’s three new Olympic silver medallists would
quite likely never have had the opportunity to take part in any Games.
The debate over Singapore’s reliance on these imported athletes has
been going on for the past decade, and the sports fraternity has
reiterated the importance of these achievers to the development of
sports here.
Much cynicism still hangs in the air – at coffee shops and on online
forums – that Singapore didn’t really win at the Olympics since all
three paddlers were China-born.
Nowhere else, it seems, do you witness such disenchantment simply
because the athletes bringing home the medals aren’t native.
Perhaps it is because the table tennis win is Singapore’s only one at
these Games. Elsewhere, there could be less scrutiny when foreign-born
and native athletes both come home with an assortment of medals.
But unlike Hammon, Holden and many others who hold two passports,
Singapore’s lack of a dual citizenship policy means foreign-born
athletes have to give up one for another.
And surely that will qualify them as Singaporeans in more ways than
one. Chinese-Singaporeans.
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