Athens 2004: here I come!

OK, so what does one do when one realises that one's not going to make the national squad and be sent to the Athens Olympics?

Train harder? Naahh!

I'm thinking of emigrating: remember the Ethiopian (?) swimmer in Sydney? He took more than twice the time of the other swimmers in each race... and he nearly drowned on the longer distances, stating that "he had never swum so far before"... Basically, he was like you or me...

And the Thai cross-country skier in Salt Lake City? He didn't have many hours of snow training... Actually, I would probably have beaten that guy...

Now, I'm thinking that I could be them in Athens 2004. I only have to figure out what country would be my best bet if I am to emigrate. Where would a Swedish B class player be #1? The African countries are out of the question -- they have proper federations and even players on the world ranking. Same with most South American countries... So it'd have to be some really small and remote country with literally NO badminton culture... I was thinking along the lines of some small pacific island nation like Palau, but they have quite a strong Japanese influence so I might run into competition... Andorra maybe, but no, they also have a badminton federation... Hmmm... San Marino? Maybe, considering that their "national sport", Forumla 1 racing, isn't an Olympic sport... And judging from IBF statistics, St Helen's islands only has 27 players registered with their national association -- but that's still 27 too many! And Afghanistan just doesn't appeal to me right now...

Any suggestions?

 

So in this sense Olympic badminton has special rules? In other sports, every participating coutry has a right to send at least one athlete in each sport. It is the national organizations that decides who gets to go. You don't have to be ranked, or even to have results in that sport...

 

Well, it's not about badminton but still relevant to the current discussion, so I have to share this great article with you:
(I especially like to think what could have happened had Stefan Raab gotten his citizenship -- read last paragraph)

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It's the taking part that counts

There is still a place, just, for the also-luged, says Duncan Mackay

Friday February 8, 2002
The Guardian

The Winter Olympic flame ignites ambitions in the strangest places. If the Jamaican bobsleigh team in 1988 have come to symbolise triumph against the odds, then there is a list of no less improbable characters here to fulfil the Olympic precept that taking part is more important than winning.

Everyone loves a hopeless loser. It was Kenya's Philip Boit, nephew of Michael Boit, the 1972 Olympic 800 metres bronze medallist, who captured the imagination in Nagano four years ago as he struggled through the 10km cross-country ski race to finish 97th and last, 20 minutes behind the winner and nearly eight behind the 96th.

Boit is back, claiming to be more competent and, with the 10km discontinued, moving up to a longer distance. But there will be no shortage of candidates to succeed him for the distinction of finishing last in this gruelling discipline.

Prawat Nagvajara, a 43-year-old engineering professor, will become the first athlete from Thailand to compete in the winter games. He received a pipe of peace from a Native American when he checked into the athletes' village on Wednesday and watched the Thai national flag raised.

Born in Bangkok, Nagvajara started skiing when he went to college in Boston. He skied for fun then but later competed in local races and began dreaming of the Olympics. All he had to do to qualify was compete in five international races.

Alongside Nagvajara on the red carpet here stood another cross-country skier from a country with no winter games pedigree, Isaac Menyoli of Cameroon. He wants to use what he calls his "15 minutes of fame" to press home to Africans the dangers of Aids.

Menyoli, a sprinter in high school, will be watched by his US-based family over the next 17 days and hopes his races will be shown on television in Cameroon. "My friends think it is very stupid; we celebrate the Summer Olympics at home but the Winter Olympics are unheard of," he said.

Then there is Dinah Browne in the luge. Born and raised on St Croix, one of the Virgin Islands, she was in her teens before she saw a snowflake. She did not sit in a luge until she was 29, three years ago when she attended a two-week training camp in Calgary designed to broaden luge's appeal in countries outside Europe.

"I had a vague notion of what the sport was," she said. "Then they gave me a helmet and I was like, 'Oh, you need a helmet?' It was a real natural feeling."

Since the international luge federation began its development camps in 1987 it has trained people from India, China, Brazil and 13 other nations not usually associated with the sport; 15 who first tried the sport in the camp will be here, including a father-and-son team from Venezuela.

Following in the ice-tracks of the Jamaicans are Dan Janjigian and Yorgo Alexandrou , representing Armenia in the two-man bob having done all their training on a housing estate in San Jose, California.

They break off training for fund-raising exercises, such as the $100-a-plate meal held this week in a church hall. Janjigian, who supports the bobsleigh team with proceeds from his website design company, lost his original brakeman to a back injury. He went home and recruited a 19-year-old weightlifting champion, only for a visa to be refused in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. So he ended up with Alexandrou, his best friend and an importer of Greek wine.

Not every federation enjoys seeing its sport made fun of, in what may be its only appearance on television in four years. The International Ski Federation (FIS) has been accused of betraying the Olympic ideal by imposing selection criteria to avoid a repeat of such images from Albertville as the Lebanese skier overtaking the Moroccan in the slalom. And then there was Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, who took part in the ski jumping in Calgary in 1988.

The most vocal critic of this policy is Bashar al Huneidi after he was blocked from becoming the first athlete to represent Kuwait in the winter games. He began as a desert skier on the dunes, there being no accessible snow mountains, but he has since spent five months a year skiing in Europe and competed in 12 FIS races this winter in the hope of acceptance for the giant slalom.

"I'm not saying there should not be any criteria at all," he said. "I'm just saying they should be modified to enable competent sportsmen from small nations to be there."

But a debt of gratitude may be in order to the Moldovan embassy in Berlin who blocked the attempt by a German TV comedian to get citizenship as a way of competing for them in the cross-country skiing. Stefan Raab, who once performed in the Eurovision song contest with a song called Wadde Hadde Dudde Da, is no stranger to publicity stunts. One was to take on a woman boxer. He lost.

 

Oh darn it, there goes my chances...

 

I'll pass

Mmm... well, hardly the same this, is it?

For a Swede, the Commonwealth games is as obscure as... say... the ice yachting championships.