China’s Other Olympic Team

Like any other major city in China, Hong Kong has dutifully supported and contributed to the Beijing Games, and nationalist sentiment has not been wanting. We’ve been screening the immigration lines for dodgy looking Tibetans and their grad school Western friends (sorry fellas, but you can’t rock an orange t-shirt with skin that white). Attempts to link the Games with China’s human rights record have left us unmoved (thanks for your Bangkok pieties, Mr President, but have you been to Guantanamo recently?). And everyone in Hong Kong wants to see China top the medals table.
But here’s the thing. We have been such assiduous nationalists that we’ve forgotten that Hong Kong has an Olympic team of its own. I feel faintly sorry for them. All over town it’s Go Beijing and Stand Strong, China. But there have been no hoorays for Hong Kong’s 34 Olympians, who quietly slipped away to Beijing the other day. Did any of us see them go? No.
Of course, it’s one of those weird historical anomalies that Hong Kong has an independent Olympics squad at all. Apparently, we lobbied the IOC for this in the 1940s, when still a British colony, and were gobsmacked to be given the go-ahead in 1951. Since then, we have competed in 13 Olympics. But things are different, post-reunification. There no longer seems to be any real justification for the continuation of separate teams, even though our athletes must love it. Let’s be frank—how many of them would earn selection if they had to go through China’s grueling Olympic machine?
This doesn’t mean that I begrudge them their tickets to Beijing—where, incidentally, the smog will present us no problems at all—and it doesn’t excuse the fact that our team has been so dreadfully overlooked this year. In fact, this post is going out to them. Do us proud, guys, and bring home a couple of medals to add to the two we’ve won to date. (You may smirk general reader, but if mahjong was an Olympic sport that medal total would look very, very different…)