Malaysia has never won a gold medal before as I am writing this though Chong Wei will be trying to go against the odds to beat the formidable Great Wall of Lin Dan. Its surprising we have never won gold I mean WHY is squash NOT an Olympic sport but bloody Beach Volleyball is??? Malaysia, for a small population and people of medium built, and minimal support from the government, have actually done very well if you consider that we have atheletes right at the very top in games such as squash, badminton and bowling. While we are at that, why is Bowling not an Olympic sports as well???
Michael Phelps is fantastic but he is certainly not the greatest Olympian. You cannot and should not count by the number of medal you win cause the entire Games is tilted to certain sports. If you are very good in swimming or gymnastics, you could win multiple medals. You can be the very best long jumper or boxer, and you will only win ONE. Great Olympians must generate the kind of indefatigable spirit, that something special, I think I would rank Carl Lewis way above Phelps.
None of the Olympics city planning committee can budget properly. I mean, do we understand what budgeting is? The average budget over runs for the past 17 summer and winter games is 179%. I mean, the next time we do a budget for the next Olympics, YOU MUST multiply that figure by 2 so as to get to a real sense of the real figure at the end. Budgets must take into account of exigencies, if you don't know how after so many games, don't think you qualify to run and plan any games. These IOC planning committees are sooo like Malaysian GLC projects, always massive cost over runs, I can understand if it was 10%-20% variance but to be so out of the budgeted figure means you have been:
- over optimistic
- don't know how what the exigencies are
- poor adherence to budget in implementation and execution
- the knowledge that the country will always be there to pick up the extra tab
London is almost ten times the original budget at 24 billion pounds. Great financial management.
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Or we could be like some countries and buy China sportsmen. These buggers think money can buy everything
Actually amount of money spent on scouting for talent at young age (5-6 yrs), putting these potential Olympians through 10+ years of intensive training under the best professional coaches, eliminating the 90% from the programme that do not make the grade, opportunity cost of those who sacrifice >10 yrs of their lives training 6 hrs a day for the chance to maybe make it...etc etc...is somewhat correlated to success in winning medals
sure, there're always outliers like Jamaica (sprinters), Ethiopia/Kenya (long distance running) etc which hardly has tons of $ to throw at sports development yet achieve great success. But by and large, those with lots of medals would have spent enormous sums over many years on spotting, recruiting, training potential Olympians..
Malaysia is lousy lah.
North Korea with nothing also can win 4 gold medals.
We just don't have the mental strength.
Surprising that squash is not in the London 2012 edition although I'm sure there are more squash players than beach volleyball players in Britain. My two sen guess is that Britain knows they have no chance of getting gold with our superb Nicol David still at her prime and also the paying audience for squash is likely far smaller than the paying audience for beach volleyball. Politics and economics man, forget about sportsmanship!!
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