Monday, May 31, 2010

Singapore “National” Team?

At the World Table-Tennis Championships held in Moscow, Russia, the Singapore “national” team beat China 3-1 in the final to become world champions. However don’t expect Singaporeans to be excited about the win; expect us to be slightly embarrassed by it.

The reason is simple; the trio of paddlers that represented Singapore were all born in China and recruited by Singapore, given Singapore citizenship just to play for Singapore.If you search the internet, you would see more than a few comments stating it was a final between the China A team against the China B team.

Although it’s not that unusual for teams to have a few foreigners in their team, Singapore took it to the extreme by filling the whole team with foreigners. Looking at it that way, it’s no surprise Singaporeans are less than thrilled with the win by the Singapore “national” team.

2 comments:

complainking said...

I think the Olympics silver medal got more fanfare and coverage than this. Maybe trying to blend in is the reason why the girls adopted English names like Tiffany etc, which was happily dropped during this competition to remind us of their Chinese-ness. Like it matters anyway.

Ghost said...

Whether the girls has English names does not matter. And we are Singaporeans, imagine what other teams at the championship were thinking!