Sports bodies left to do some soul-searching
Sports bodies left to do some soul-searching
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN (AFP): Southeast Asia's lack of athletic class was laid bare at the region's biennial sporting showcase here over the past week, prompting alarmed sports officials to do some anguished soul-searching.
Malaysia led calls for radical Southeast Asian (SEA) Games surgery amid spotty competition that saw 10 SEA Games track and field records fall along with 22 in swimming, but which failed to dent any world marks or Asian standards.
The 10 countries' half a billion people, which make up nearly 9 percent of the world's population, also managed to make a mockery of some women's athletics events with only two participants each in the 10km walk, the 5,000m run and the javelin throw.
The two Asian Games record holders in Olympic sports among the more than 2,000 athletes here -- swimmers Ratapong Sirisanont of Thailand and Malaysia's Alex Lim -- did their share in setting new SEA Games marks in the 200m men's individual medley and 100m breaststroke respectively.
However both were off their times set at last year's Bangkok Asian Games.
U.S.-based Singaporean swimmer Joscelin Yeo, who set six Games records here, appeared to have made the best progress. Her coach David Lim said her 1 minute 0.44 seconds effort in the 100m butterfly made her the world's 16th best in the event.
Some Indonesians have achieved world-class status in archery and badminton, and Thais and Filipinos have reached the lighter classes of the Olympic boxing finals.
But some of the best gave the Brunei event a miss, notably world-ranked Thai tennis star Tamarine Tanasugarn and Indonesian shuttlers Mia Audina and Susi Susanti.
The gap with the rest of the world was particularly apparent in SEA Games athletics.
Nunung Jayadi took the Games pole vault standard past the five-meter barrier with a 5.05 meter effort last Wednesday. The six-year-old Asian mark is 5.9m and Ukraine's Sergey Bubka's world record is 6.14m.
Sporting standards suffer when member federations refuse to send their best athletes, said Khalid Mohamad Yunis, president of Malaysia's athletics federation.
"It defeats the purpose of having the Southeast Asian Games every two years," he told AFP. The meet was founded 40 years ago.
Crisis
A wrenching economic crisis, which saw a plunge in living standards in countries such as Indonesia, was no doubt partly to blame.
The defending SEA Games champion, who gorged on 194 gold medals in Jakarta two years ago, threw in the towel this year and, with less than two full days of competition to go, had racked up just 38 golds.
Their chef de mission offered to quit over the performance that saw them relegated to third place.
"I know Indonesians are very unhappy over the whole episode," police general Mochammad Hindarto said Friday.
"I don't want to give excuses. I'm prepared to take the blame for Indonesia's poor outing this time."
Wide gaps in class are also apparent within Southeast Asia. Cambodia's men's basketball team set a new Games record on Friday when they lost by a 103-point margin in a qualifying round tie against the Philippines.
National Olympic Committee official Meas Sarin said the 84 athletes from Cambodia, an Indochinese nation still recovering from war and genocide, were only in Brunei to be counted.
He said he was not disappointed, even though they were the only contingent in the competition yet to win a medal of any color.