Why Malaysia cannot produce good women players? It's simple. In Malaysia, Malay is the majority race (66%), Chinese (23%), Indian (9%) and the rest (2%). Malay all are muslim, and in Malaysia muslim girls cannot wear short pants/shirt at anytime. So how are they going to play in sports? Can you wear long pants, long gown & scraf playing badminton? How are you going to expect If just depends on the 23% of chinese and the others race?
There was a thread earlier about the women badminton players from Iran, and how they have to be fully covered while playing badminton. It's too bad Muslim women aren't encouraged to play sports... i think that's why there's such a big skill gap between the men and women players in Indonesia and Malaysia. G
A good system can still make the difference. Let's see. If that limitation is inflexible, that still leaves 34% of Malaysia's total population (estimated at 24 million) the female members of which are not necessarily religiously or culturally bound to remain clothed so modestly as to prevent a career in professional sport. 34% of 24 million is still over 8 million. The women's team of Denmark - a country with a total population of 5 million - remains competitive with every nation but China. Denmark is definitely the exception to the rule, but so is Malaysia. The next smallest badminton power, by population, is Korea with twice Malaysia's population. Despite having twice as many men to choose champions from, Korea is never a hands-down favourite over Malaysia in men's competitions. Nor is Indonesia despite having 8 times as many men. The challenge in remaining competitive may be greater when it comes to the relatively even smaller talent pool for Malaysian women, but it is not insurmountable. That is why so many other people posting to this thread have looked at the reasons for hope for the future of the Malaysian women's team and at the variables that can and should change in order for the women to succeed. I'm sure it will take money and effort and will on the part of Malaysia's badminton community.
really? haha.. no wonder she looks so diff the star newspaper captioned her as wong mew choo... then again, they mix up a lot of photos b4.
I think some Muslim families in Malaysia are less conservative. In some sports such as bowling, the most celebrated women bowler is Shalin, a Malay sportswoman who's met with great success at home and abroad. And I might also add that in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, the girls are not doing too badly in international badminton although relative to their male counterpart's performance, they are miles apart. But I guess it has also to do with the general picture that fewer women participate in sports than men worldwide. Women have a more limited 'active' sporting career in the sense that they have to think of starting a family earlier and having to raise children.
Bowling is a game, not a sport. If we're talking over-protective parents keeping their daughters from a life of competition and the public eye, that's one thing, but when the activity doesn't involve wearing shorts or anything else that would violate a strict dress code, that isn't the same as badminton. But maybe you're right about the existence of less conservative families. Was the Sidek sister who was on the national team Muslim? As for Indonesia, it's a huge country and something like 20% of the country isn't Muslim so even if that influence was as strong as Alloh suggests, you're still looking at a talent pool in Indonesia of 40 million (20 million women). That's almost as many non-Muslim girls as Uber Cup runner-up Korea has. Many of the women that I see representing Indonesia seem to be Christian or otherwise non-Muslim: Susi Susanti, Lilyana. Ratnasari and Yulianti has Catholic-sounding names. And none of this proves that there is an actual exclusion. Finding a true champion is so random at the best of times. And so many kids are excluded from the talent pool by reason of geography or economics or preferences for other sports or other activities. Loh makes a good point, too, that this particular reason is just a slightly more visible one among the numerous obstacles to women's participation in sport. Look at the difference in prize money at some competitions or look at how long it took for women's professional sports leagues to take off in a huge market like the U.S. I remember a marathon in Korea here one year where the prize money for first place was US$70,000 for the top man and US$5000 for the top woman. As justification for these types of prize money decisions one often hears that women don't draw as many spectators or that they don't beat as many competitors. These have a chicken-or-egg ring to them because you can reason that you only draw more competitors by offering more prize money. These rationalizations are vaguely similar to decisions described here by organizations like BAM not to bank on women competitors.
So you noticed my little pot-shot, did you? I wasn't sure anyone would. I didn't actually produce a definition to justify my rejection of bowling's sport status but, as a matter of fact, I do have my own facetious definition. I like to say that it's only a sport if the sweating is caused only by the weather or your clothes. In other words, pool, golf, bowling, darts, archery, curling and shooting are definitely out. Baseball only achieves sport status for a few players at select moments that are few and far between. The sweating a golfer does is the same as I do when I walk to the store to buy juice and that's not a sport. If you stood around in polyester pants and leather shoes watching one tall guy scratch himself and spit tobacco for 3 hours on a summer's afternoon, you'd sweat just as much as the average baseball player does. In other words, I'm being rather nit-picking about the definition of "physical exertion" referenced in the definitions you quoted. In other words, I'm just messing around and you're better off with those dictionary definitions. As for game, the idea of keeping score makes that a category of which part of the activities involved with many sports are a subset. Hence the need for terms like "game, set,..." in our sister sport of tennis. Some sports, like badminton, deal with games while others, like cycling or diving, do not. As for Zamaliah Sidek, I thought she might qualify as an exception to Alloh's rule but was unwilling to jump to conclusions about her religion. Although I admit the conclusion might have been pretty obvious, there are people who change their beliefs and I wasn't about to make assumptions about someone I know nothing about.
that's not very fair... i know a few malay girls who can play really well. and who says they can't wear shorts anyways? i've seen malay girls in shorts and miniskirts b4... norsyahliza baharum is one of the malay players i noe who can play well and does not wear long pants/gowns/scarf while playing... in fact, there are a few malay players currently in bjss as well.