Sporting Chance
The recent flurry of sporting events has thrown up a number of aspects which I found particularly inspiring even though only tangentially linked to the sports themselves.
While most media focus on the National Games was naturally on the sporting contests, there was less attention paid to the fact that the event could only have been successfully organised with the support of local volunteers. The Agency for Volunteer Service appealed to the public for help in marshalling the competitors and spectators, and tens of thousands of ordinary Hongkongers applied. The target was to engage 10,000. The applicants were vetted and 16,000 taken on. They were trained, given uniforms and duly devoted themselves to carrying out important duties such as handling injuries, crowd management, guest reception, spectator services and logistical support. Without their unpaid efforts Hong Kong’s first time as co-host could not have gone ahead as smoothly as it did.
The second area worth mentioning is the passionate spectator support for Hong Kong representatives. My first experience of this was not at the National Games themselves but at the football match between Hong Kong and Bangladesh some weeks earlier. A packed Kai Tak stadium of nearly 50,000 was a cauldron of sound, the north stand in particular loud and proud. They ignored the rather insipid official slogans on display (“Cheer for us” and “This is our home”) and roared out their own anthem “We are the Hong Kong boys. And we’re going to make some noise”.
I found several aspects of this message very attractive. It made no attempt at political correctness – men and women of all ages and races were expected to, and did, sing it lustily – and it was in English. What could be more fitting for a multiethnic team in an international city.
The same enthusiasm and energy carried over to the rugby matches in the National Games as the Hong Kong team stormed their way to the final where they overcame a robust no nonsense Shandong squad, the defending champions. The chants may have been different (I could not tell from the tv) and most fervour may have been in the south stand as is traditional for rugby, but the power and emotion were on a similar level, as a member of the winning team confirmed to a local radio audience later. There were similar levels of vociferous support for Hong Kong teams in other sports.
The final aspect of the sports scene here worth highlighting is the contribution of hundreds of volunteer coaches at our local sporting clubs working hard every weekend to develop the next generation of players in rugby and football. There are some 20 local clubs where parents are welcome to bring their children even if they are not members. I am familiar with the situation in these two sports but no doubt something similar applies in others too. (This is quite separate from paid coaching services.) Without the amateurs freely giving up their time for love of the game, there would be no pipeline of future players for us to cheer in due course.
In addition to the health and fitness benefits to the children, they also learn important life lessons about working together to achieve a common aim. As the coaches never tire of saying “There is no ‘i’ in team”.
With this backdrop in mind we can turn our attention to the games themselves. The first thing to catch the eye here is the wide variety of sports on display. Apart from the high visibility ones with which we are all familiar – rugby, swimming, fencing, cycling, and golf – there were also sports with which we may be less familiar. Be honest, who among us even knew we had a handball team (apart from the players themselves of course). And beach volleyball? We even won a gold medal in sailing and I’ll bet most Hongkongers did not know we even had a representative until the medal presentation ceremony. So we all had our sporting horizons expanded.
Also pleasing to note was the standard of the local athletes. We knew about fencing because of Edgar Cheung Ka-lok’s heroics at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics. But in these National Games we won gold in swimming and cycling plus sailing. These results are a tribute to the community’s collective efforts over many years.
A word on facilities. The Kai Tak Sports Centre is a game changer which means we can now host major events with expected attendance circa 50,000. But the pitch does cut up rather badly after intensive use and we need to explore ways to minimise this. The Tseung Kwan O Velodrome meets the standards of the International Cycling Union, so we have that subject covered, but where do we sit on tennis and swimming/diving?
Bearing in mind that we hosted the East Asian Games in 2009 and co-hosted the National Games this year, the next logical step is the Olympics. Whether that is in 2036 or later, we must make sure our facilities are up to standard and we can play a full part with Macau and Guangdong.
I would not want to pretend that everything in the sporting garden is perfect. We know from the fiasco over the football match with Singapore that we have not yet found a way to keep out ticket touts. And from the chaos over return of personal clothing after the streetathon that some of our administration needs work. For the National Games themselves, it was disappointing that it was not possible on the official website to buy tickets in English for events in a city where it is one of the official languages. We can and must do better.