Photo from Zimbio.com
If I owned a DVD store, the weekend of the 8 August 2008 at the start of the Beijing Olympics I’d follow Brandon Hammer’s suggestions and have these 3 movies on a special promo; Chariots of Fire, Cool Runnings and Munich. All three movies share the same Olympic theme. I’d do it simply to participate as best I can towards a world event. Even more so because my country was not only participating in the Opening Ceremony by taking part in the traditional march past, but was also sending 2 athletes, 15 year old Maria Grace Kon and 20 year old Mohammed Yazid Yatimi Yusof to take part in swimming and the short put respectively. Both are pretty much the best in the land.
Out of the 3 movies, Cool Runnings is a favourite and embodies the true spirit of the Olympic games. A Jamaican bobsled team taking part in the Winter Olympics in Calgary 1988 is inspiring in its simple message. An endeavour undertaken to be among the world’s best. It doesn’t matter that your country is one of those whose athletes reign supreme, or those that are poorest. The Olympic games is all about participating and experience, whether you win or lose.
According to Wikipedia, in 1988 Brunei’s first participation in the Olympic games was limited to the Opening Ceremony Parade with the lone official but no athletes. It wasn’t until the 1996 Games in Atlanta, USA that Brunei started competing in Olympics, and then every games since then with a single athlete. In Athens 2004, Jimmy Anak Ahar competed in the 1500 meters and finished last. The Times has a wonderful story on the ‘finished but not beaten’ participants of the 2004 Olympic games in Athens:
Yet despite our relentless obsession with victory, despite the well-funded gold-medal strategies of sporting giants like the U.S. and China, despite the lure of multimillion-dollar advertising contracts for the most winsome of gold medalists, the Games were as much about those who finished dead last in their events as about those who took home gold. How else to explain the giddy joy of Katura Marae, proud citizen of the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu? The 14-year-old came in last in her heat of the 100-m dash, yet still clocked her fastest time of the season, 0.02 seconds behind Tit Linda Sou, Cambodia's lone female sprinter, who ran the best time of her life in her Olympic debut. "I am so excited," rejoiced Marae, who qualified for Athens through a wild-card slot and made up half of her country's Olympic contingent. "Being here is just as wonderful as winning a gold medal. Thank you, thank you to everyone."…
…One of the most poignant final-place finishes, though, came from Brunei's Jimmy Anak Ahar, the Southeast Asian nation's sole Olympic athlete, who straggled far behind the pack in the 1,500 m, erasing his country's dreams of Olympic respectability. Still sucking wind after his 4:14.11 time, 40 seconds slower than gold medalist El Guerrouj, Ahar swept past reporters, his head downcast. Yet the Bruneian's performance was surely more honorable than that of Uzbekistan's Olga Shchukina, who not only finished last in her qualifying group in the shot put but later tested positive for an anabolic steroid…
As it turns out the Beijing Olympic Games, underfoot as I post, will have no Brunei competitors. We still wanted to bask in the glory of the ceremony parade despite no athletes, which led to my country making breaking news on the Inquirer.net with a screaming headline "Brunei expelled from Olympics' opening ceremony". We've blipped on the radar now.
Approving a Brunei athlete entrance to the Olympic Games should have been a no brainer. The country must back its athletes all the way because being small doesn't mean we can't strive.
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