Macanese Cuisine
I rarely post about news events happening in the Emerald Isles (formerly known as Pearl Of The Orient, until Hong Kong started to call itself such), but this issue has really come to my attention.Early morning, Filipinos woke up on a bitter note. Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra accused the 23rd South East Asian Games host country of cheating, rigging the results in favor of the Filipino athletes.
Many Filipinos would just shrug it off as a comment from a sore loser, since Philippines is currently (as of this writing) in the lead of having the most gold medals so far, with Vitenam trailing second and Thailand placing third.
Accusations of cheating in sports events is never new. We Filipinos have a term for it: LUTONG MAKAW (Macanese Cuisine). Don't ask me what Macau has to do with cheating and rigging.
But PM Shinawatra cannot be blamed of smelling the aroma of Macanese Food being served in age-old Philippine stadia. For one, their goal of 114 gold medals in the SEA Games is now considered an impossibile dream. Second, some of his prized athletes settled for silver against, well what do you know, Filipinos, especially in "subjective" events like diving, taekwondo, boxing, and the like.
But sad as it may seem, his observation is somewhat true. Just today, a Filipino runner was stripped of his gold medal in the 5000m race after finding out that he tried to push aside his Thai opponent at the homestretch. That same Thai earlier settled for a silver medal in the 10,000m race against the same Filipino runner.
Don't get me wrong. I am proud of our Filipino athletes. I am happy that they are winning, and I hope they continue winning. But what I want to point out is that I hope their performance at the SEA Games will be at par when the Asian Games come, or better yet, the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I hope they will perform better than Thailand and Vietnam. Only then we can conclude that our athletes don't need the help of certain officials to win.
2 Comments:
the fact that the pinoy athlete got stripped of his medal indicates that the appeals system and perhaps, the officiating, is working just fine. i just think that since we are the host country, we saved some money since we no longher had to fly our athletes abroad, thus we are able to field more; increasing our chances in winning more medals. assuming that we'd be able to field the same number of athletes in 2008 in beijing and assuming that we're really better than thailand and vietnam, there's still no guarantee that we'll get more medals than them. after all, it's not only them we're up against but the entire world. :)
thailand is a sore loser. but let them complain. they have the right to.
see you around.
Sat Dec 03, 09:37:00 AM GMT+8
Yey! The Philippines is the over-all champion! Yey!??? Hmmmm...
I just think that some games were rigged. The rankings were a bit suspicious.
Oh well, let's just wait until the next one to be held in Thailand. Filipino athletes, prove your worth okay? :-)
Mon Dec 05, 11:20:00 PM GMT+8
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