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29 Monday Sep 2014
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28 Sunday Sep 2014
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China, South Korea, and Japan still hold the top three medal count spots with Day #9 of the 17th Asian Games finished – with 199, 123, and 115 respectively.
Malaysia now has 17, with three gold medals; Burma finally won another medal for a total of three, two of which are gold; Thailand picked up two more and has 12, two golds and the rest bronze – the latest gold for the kingdom was won in women’s sepak takraw on Sunday; Vietnam has 27 with one gold; Singapore won another for a total of 12, one of which is gold; and Indonesia has one gold too for a total of 10.
With one week into the Games 17 world records have been set, which is a record in itself. At the last Asian Games in 2010 only three athletes posted a world record time or score.
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27 Saturday Sep 2014
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With Day #8 of the 17th Asian Games concluded the leaders in medals continue to be China, South Korea, and Japan, at 186, 110, and 108 respectively. So at least for now South Korea’s #2 place is legit.
Vietnam won another medal and now has 26, Thailand did too and has a grand total of 10, as did Indonesia which now has 9. Malaysia, Burma, Laos, and Singapore failed to win any medals on Day #8.
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26 Friday Sep 2014
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The good news is the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced on September 24, 2104 it would add a new non-discrimination clause to its host city contract that would uphold Principle 6 of the Olympic Charter which states, “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.” Gay rights activists used Principle 6, which was already part of the IOC’s charter, to protest discrimination against gays in Russia during the Sochi Winter Games.
Christopher Dubi, the IOC Sports Director, says the new clause will include “the prohibition of any form of discrimination, using the wording of Fundamental Principle 6 of the Olympic Charter.” Under the new clause future host cities must abide by international human rights standards in order to host the games, including the protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens and athletes. The IOC stated that the changes to the host city contract “are the result of the experience gained by the IOC in previous editions of the Olympic Games.” Uh, that would be you Mr. Putin.
The bad news is the IOC’s timing, which served as a not-so timely reminder that The Olympic Council of Asia (OCA), which runs the Asian Games, falls under the banner of the IOC and is required to adhere to all of its rules, regulations, and principles, as are all Host City Organizing Committees, which in turn must adhere to the rules, regulations, and charter of the OCA. Not that when it comes to the gays that’s much of a problem for South Korea where the current Games are playing out. It could, however, become an issue for the 2018 Games in Indonesia. Jakarta will be the host city and while Indonesia’s capital city is not in one of the provinces under Sharia law – one of which recently proposed legislation for punishing gays by caning – in Jakarta lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are legally labeled as “cacat” or mentally handicapped and are therefore not protected by the various legal rights guaranteed by the constitution to all other citizens.
As for the Olympic Games, neither Brazil, the host nation for the 2016 Games, nor Japan, the host nation for the 2020 Olympics is a problem. Same-sex sexual activity was legalized in Japan in 1880 and in Brazil gays enjoy many of the same legal protections available to breeders, including the right to marry their same-sex partner. But there is discrimination and then there’s discrimination. And there are two separate actions taken by the Incheon Asian Games Organizing Committee (IAGOC) against which the OCA, in light of the IOC’s announcement, is now calling foul. For the Incheon Games it may be a case of too little too late, but how the IOC and OCA go about enforcing their charter will set a precedence for future games, which may have an impact on Jakarta in 2018.
The first controversy revolves around the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), one of the many International Federations (IF) that govern individual sports. In this case there is a bit of a catch-22 going on. The Olympic charter recognizes and accepts that it is the IF which establishes the eligibility criteria of the relevant sport. However, it is incumbent upon the IF to do so in accordance with the Olympic charter.
The issue at the Incheon Games is that the ATP has a rule stating that players cannot be entered into more than one tournament in the same tournament week. The 17th Asian Games schedule for men’s tennis overlap the China Open in Beijing by one day. The China Open is jointly organized by the ATP and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), and the WTA agreed to be flexible and allow players to report to China later or even withdraw to focus on the Asian Games. But the ATP rejected any such concessions. This forced six of the world’s leading male tennis players to withdraw from the Asian Games out of fear of facing a three-year ban and a $100,000 by the ATP.
The tennis controversy, and a similar problem with the Incheon Asian Games Organizing Committee denying the eligibility of NBA player Andray Blatche to compete on the Philippines’ team, was addressed in the OCA’s statement, which amounted to a tongue lashing. The strongly worded statement reminded sports governing bodies to protect the rights of athletes. “The right of the athletes must be the highest priority,” said OCA Director General Husain Al-Musallam. “Every athlete has the right to represent their country’s flag without discrimination or without the threat of a financial penalty.”
The OCA also criticized the Incheon Asian Games Organizing Committee for what it called “preventing athletes from representing their countries an international event”, although according to a spokesperson for the IAGOC the problem is with the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) and not the IAGOC. At issue is FIBA’s rule regarding the wearing of headgear. In this case that headgear is the hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women in respect to their religion. While competitors have been allowed to wear hijabs in other sports, including badminton, shooting, and track and field at the Asian Games, in accordance with FIBA’s rules in Basketball they are not.
Asian Games Organizing Committee spokeswoman Anna Jihyun You told The Associated Press that ten minutes after the scheduled start of the match between Qatar and Mongolia on September 24, the game was declared forfeited and awarded to Mongolia because the Qatari players refused to take off their hijab. Ms. You said match officials did not receive any instructions to allow head coverings, and were only following the rules which restrict the use of headgear, hair accessories, and jewelry.
The Qatar women said they had expected to be able to wear a hijab when they arrived in Korea and only found out when they arrived at the Incheon stadium that it was still banned. “This is an insult to us, they did not respect our religion,” said Qatar forward Refaa Morjan Mohammed, adding that the team had worn the head scarf in Arab Championships without problems. The Qatar squad has five players who wear a hijab and six who do not.
But the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) strongly denied there was any religious connotation in the longstanding ban. It say the rule in question is over twenty years old and only recently has been questioned. FIBA is currently allowing exemptions to the rule, upon request, for a two-year trial period but only at the national level. FIBA’s governing body says it will evaluate the rule again next year, and determine whether to allow head covers at some level of international competition from next summer forward. Meanwhile, Qatar forfeited an additional match against Nepal, and has since announced that the country’s women’s basketball squad was withdrawing from the Games.
The OCA’s statement chastising IFs said the federations “have the duty to protect their athletes and allow them to exercise their right of freedom of choice with dignity.” The OCA also published a copy of two key points in the Olympic Charter and urged the sporting bodies to consider them. “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity. “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.
While the specific issues involved with current problems at the Incheon Games stem from international federation rules, and not the laws of the host country as gay rights issues did at the Sochi Olympics, the 17th Asian Games is an opportunity for the IOC to show how seriously it takes its decision to require all governing bodies associated with the sports world under its guidance to adhere to Olympic principles and its charter. FIBA’s claim that its rule that prevents Muslim women from adhering to the dictates of their religion is a matter of procedure and not religious discrimination should hold no more water than Russia’s claim that it does not discriminate against its gay citizens, but only wants to protect the country’s youth.
[‘The XVII Asiad’ are a series of posts about hot competitors and general articles about the 2014 17th Asian Games of interest to gay men. So, yeah, lots of hot male eye candy. Click the XVII Asiad’ graphic below for additional news, stories, and pictures.]
26 Friday Sep 2014
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Day #7 of the Asian Games ended with the top three medal totals remaining in the hands of China, South Korea, and Japan at 179, 104, and 107. Once again South Korea is considered to be in the #2 spot as it has 31 gold medals against Japan’s 30 even though Japan has won more medals over all.
Malaysia picked up another three medals for a total of 13, Singapore won one more for a grand haul of 11. Vietnam also won three more medals and now has 25, and both Indonesia and Thailand added an additional medal to their tally and have won 8 and 9 respectively. Burma and Laos still have only the two medals they started the week out with.
The big news for Thailand was the Thai men’s national football team defeating China 2-0 to earn a place in the quarter finals. Both goals were scored by Adisak Kraisorn and earned the team an additional 400,000 baht to add to the 500,000 baht the Thai government pays to reward its players for doing their jobs.
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25 Thursday Sep 2014
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There are 36 different sports being played at the 17th Asian Games. If you tried to sit down and come up with what those 36 various sports are, you’d probably miss a few. Like kabaddi. Just because you never heard of them. Then there’s fluff – like synchronized swimming – that you might not think of even though it is an Olympic sport too. Badminton too is both an Olympic sport and one played at the Asian Games and while you may consider it more a fun pastime for playing in the basement, you’d be surprised how bloody the world of competitive badminton can be. Way down on that list – as in those sports you would not think of because few think of them as sports – would be bowling.
But since Thailand has won both a gold and a silver medal in that sport at the XVII Asiad, we’ll give bowling a pass. As most potential spectators do. Kinda like with cricket. But that may soon change. Kevin Dornberger, the president of World Bowling, who was bored to tears watching the a tournament in Hong Kong last month, thinks the game needs an update. Because then it would become an exciting spectator sport. And may possibly even become a rival for tennis. But for the beer crowd.
Bowling is not an Olympic sport, although it did appear once as a demonstration sport at the 1988 Games. It is, however, an official sport of the Special Olympics and has been since 1975. Which should tell you something. It’s difficult to get serious athletes to compete in a sport that requires wearing shoes a few hundred people have already had on their sweaty feet. And while its popularity can be traced to being one of the few venues in which alcohol is made readily available to competitors, as a sport – one that requires a degree of athleticism – it leaves much to be desired. Even if bowling alleys often do smell like a men’s locker room.
Nonetheless, there are 177 athletes representing 19 nations who’ll be sticking their fingers in tight little holes at the 17th Asian Games. With luck, there may even be as many spectators. And since not all luck is good, World Bowling’s president is forced to be one of them.
“I’ve watched more world championships competitions than anyone in the world,” Dornberger told The Associated Press on Wednesday on the sidelines of the 17th Asian Games bowling competition in Incheon. “And it has occurred to me that the people who say we are boring have a point.” 300 of them in fact. If you’re keeping score.
“I’m open to anything because I love our sport,” Dornberger said. “I love tradition, but it’s vital that we become an Olympic sport. If we have to be dragged into the 21st century to do that, I’m ok with that.”
He’s suggesting some radical changes to the game which he hopes to see implemented by the 2016 World Championships in Qatar. While you may think adding hurdles would help, or – not realizing what the average bowler’s body looks like – skimpy body hugging uniforms, Dornberger’s ideas are a bit more basic. First, because bowlers are not known for their math skills, he thinks every strike should count for 30 points, no matter what the next ball is. And spares would count for 20. They could do away with the traditional perfect game score of 300 too. Which made for a better movie than an athletic score anyway.
He would also like to see an arrangement similar to the soccer World Cup that would pit players against each other in a group format, culminating in finals. Scoring, possibly only in the finals, could be simplified into a frame-by-frame showdown. The player winning the frame would get one point. Any player getting to six points would automatically be the winner, and that would be the end of it. But then only a bowler would think basing your sport’s scoring on soccer would keep it out of the gutter. Because there’s nothing like un-complicating a complicated system by complicating it further.
Other leaders of the sport agree that it’s time for a change. Bill Hoffman, a five-time world champion and Hall of Fame bowler who is coaching Hong Kong’s team at the Asian Games, says competitions last too long. “It took 11 1/2 hours to complete the two rounds of play today,” he said. “That is way too long for climaxes.” Not that bowlers are known for scoring that many climaxes anyway.
Mike Seymour, an Australian who is the World Tenpin Bowling Association’s vice president, said a working group is scheduled to make four or five proposals at an executive board meeting in December in Abu Dhabi. His vision of the sport’s future is that it will soon start to look more like tennis. “I think we will see change,” he says. “I think the industry in general knows the need for change so that we are more relevant in popular culture again.”
Because nothing would make bowling more fun for spectators than using tennis, or the World Cup soccer format as a competition model.
It’s a shame the world of competitive bowling is considering such extremes in order to entice more viewers considering it had the opportunity to shine back in 2012, but let that PR bonanza slip through its fingers. Way before Michael Sam gave his boyfriend some tongue on live TV, Scott Norton – who has just won the 2012 PBA Chameleon Championship in Las Vegas – gave his husband Craig Woodward a big hug and a short kiss live on ESPN. That coulda been the kiss that was heard around the world, but since no one was watching, few remember and it took another two years before the haters vilified ESPN for showing the gays some love.
[‘The XVII Asiad’ are a series of posts about hot competitors and general articles about the 2014 17th Asian Games of interest to gay men. So, yeah, lots of hot male eye candy. Click the XVII Asiad’ graphic below for additional news, stories, and pictures.]
25 Thursday Sep 2014
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With the competitions of Day #6 of the 17th Asian Games concluded, the top three medal hauls still belong to China, Japan, and South Korea, at 155, 96, and 92 – with both Japan and South Korea now having won 28 gold medals, Japan’s ranking in the #2 spot has finally been awarded by the powers that be.
Most SE Asian countries increased their medal count on Day #6 too. Both Malaysia and Singapore now have 10, Vietnam is up to a total of 22 medals, Indonesia picked up two more medals and has now won 7, and Thailand added another medal to its haul and finished the day with a total of 8.
The big news for Day #6 is that China’s swimming superstar Sun Yang got his ass handed to him by his rival from Japan, and retaliated by calling Japan’s national anthem “ugly”. ‘Cuz international controversies are what sportsmanship is all about.
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24 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted The XVII Asiad
inIt’s not just that Joseph Schooling has won Singapore’s first medal in a male swimming event at the Asiad in 24 years thanks to his bronze performance in the 200m butterfly on Sunday, or that he won his country’s first men’s 200m butterfly medal in over thirty-two years, but that 19-year-old hottie in a Speedo broke China’s, South Korea’s, and Japan’s dominance in men’s swimming at the Games too. That’s not a bad achievement for the tiny country, and a pretty good one for the diminutive swimmer too. In an age where international competitors clock in at six feet and above, Schooling only registers at 5’7. And dripping wet, which he often is, only weighs 137.lbs.
Not that Schooling hasn’t made it to the podium before. At the 2011 Southeast Asian Games, at the age of 16, he captured 2 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze medals; that included a Games record, which qualified him for the 200m butterfly event at the 2012 Olympics in London. And while his Olympic debut didn’t go quite as planned – after placing third in his first qualifying 200m butterfly heat, a last-minute change in equipment saw him eliminated during the event’s semi-finals – at the 2013 Southeast Asian Games in Myanmar, he won five gold medals, one silver, and broke four meet records, making him the most medalled athlete at those games. James followed that victory with a silver medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in the 100m Butterfly, the first Singaporean to win a swimming medal at the Commonwealth Games – a win on behalf of his country that almost didn’t happen thanks to his country.
Singapore has a mandatory National Service requirement that all male citizens who have reached the age of 18 enroll to serve a 22- or 24-month period as Full Time National Servicemen either in the Singapore Armed Forces, Singapore Police Force, or Singapore Civil Defense Force. As required, Schooling enlisted in October 2013.But his mom, May, a tough, no-nonsense Singaporean-Chinese, began seeking a deferment for her son back in 2010 with then-Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports as well as the Singapore National Olympic Council. “They asked if he can serve six months (three months of basic and vocational training each) then go back to the States to train,” May says, but according to her that would still have affected his future as an internationally competitive swimmer.
“I told them very clearly: I’m trying to teach my son to be loyal to this country,” said May. “But why should he be loyal to a country that doesn’t even support him when he wants to achieve swimming success for it?”
Thanks to assistance that poured in from all corners of the globe, including letters of support from the men’s head coach at USA swimming and an advisor to the Singapore Sports Council, Schooling’s deferment was approved, a groundbreaking move that saw Joseph, currently studying and training at Bolles High School in the US, become the only Singaporean athlete to ever be permitted up to three years of undisturbed training. His mom jokes, “They just want to show him off at the 2015 SEA Games in Singapore, the year he’s supposed to be in National Service.”
With five individual national records, the record for the fastest ever 100-yard butterfly in US high school swimming history, and hugely impressive butterfly timings that rank amongst the top in the world (his personal best would have beat out Olympic champion Chad Le Clos’s time at the Glasgow Games), Schooling is not only expected to bring glory to his country at the Asian Games, but to medal at the 2016 Olympics too. It’s not surprising that during a post-event press conference in Incheon, gold medalist Daiya Seto admitted to keeping an eye on the young Singaporean.
“I knew him from the Commonwealth Games, knew he has potential, and I watched his qualifying race where he swam so smoothly,” said the 20-year-old Japanese. “So I paid attention and I was a little bit cautious of how he would swim in the final.”
“He probably will improve his performance in future,” he added. Joseph’s mom isn’t quite as impressed; medal winner or not, he’s still her son. “If he says a foul word, I’ll slap him,” the outspoken lady says, dead seriously.
While she says it’s been difficult having her only son thousands of kilometers away from the Marine Parade flat she calls home, Joseph, who began swimming at the age of three, has lived in Florida since he was 13. Schooling’s mom stresses that the decision of a career in swimming was always Joseph’s to make. “He wants it. I didn’t force it on him, unlike some of the kids here whose parents are the ones pushing them,” she said. “The passion comes from Joseph.”
That passion made him the most sought after swimming recruit among US colleges; he’ll begin attending the University of Texas this fall. Schooling believes being based in the United States has helped his swimming career. “I don’t get the pressure and the media hype like I do in Singapore. In the US I can just be a normal kid, and I don’t have to worry about people watching my every move. I can focus on my own expectations as opposed to other people’s. I think the environment in the US is more suitable for competitive sports because everyone is so competitive and wants to win. I’m not saying that people don’t want to win in Singapore, but it is just more electrifying with a higher tempo in the US.”
As for Olympic glory, “In 2016, he will definitely be a finalist,” Mom says. “Podium… if he gets there, it’ll be good, whatever the medal.”
2016 is also when his deferment from Singapore’s National Service expires, just over a month after the Olympic Games conclude. His mom says she told Schooling he needs to medal in Rio. “You have to give them the ammunition to defer you further!” she says she told him. And that’s doable. Just this year at the Speedo South Sectional Championship in the US he upstaged five-time Olympic champion Ryan Lochte to win the 100m butterfly final.
But for now Schooling’s focused on his events at the 17th Asian Games. He won the bronze in the 200m butterfly, and narrowly missed out on a medal in the men’s 200 meter individual medley. Even then, he told reporters he was “disappointed” with the outcome of his 200m butterfly race. “There’s not much to be really happy about the time,” he explained. “But I’ll look at the brighter side of things. It’s better to be optimistic and think about it as me winning Singapore’s first swimming medal of the Games.”
Schooling has one more chance to win a medal in Incheon for his country. He already placed first in his initial qualifying heat for the 100m butterfly. And it’s his best event. After that, he has his eyes set on Rio.
(UPDATE: Joseph won the gold medal in his 100m butterfly race, the first gold for Singapore at the 17th Asian Games.)
[‘The XVII Asiad’ are a series of posts about hot competitors and general articles about the 2014 17th Asian Games of interest to gay men. So, yeah, lots of hot male eye candy. Click the XVII Asiad’ graphic below for additional news, stories, and pictures.]