Congrats to Lee Chong Wei as Olympics badminton silver medalist.

I watched his finals match with Lin Dan and was rooting for him to win the first Olympics gold for Malaysia, but it was not to be.

He visited Parliament yesterday and would be honoured in a special ceremony in Penang tonight where he would be presented with a cheque for RM300,000 and a monthly pension of RM3,000.

Chong Wei is a national hero for all Malaysians.

It will be great pity if this national status is diminished by making him a “fodder” in the Permatang Pauh by-election – as indicated by the New Straits Times Dewan Dispatches article “Lee Chong Wei becomes Permatang Pauh fodder”.
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Very few Malaysians will know who is Teo Seng Koon. His name came up after the world’s No. 1 squash player Nicol David, 25, became the youngest Datuk when she was honoured by the Yang di Pertua Negri of Penang Tun Abdul Rahman Abbas and former men’s badminton doubles ace Ng Boon Bee, 70, was made a Datuk in conjunction with the 86th birthday of the Yang di-Pertuan Besar Negri Sembilan, Tuanku Ja’afar.

Seng Koon, 90, is the surviving member of the country’s first Thomas Cup team, which included legends Wong Peng Soon and Ong Poh Lim and created history by winning the inaugural Thomas Cup in 1948, beating Denmark 8-1.

The very fit and sprightly nonagenarian turned up at the media conference convened by DAP MP for Ipoh Barat, M. Kulasegaran as we believe that the country should give proper recognition to sportsmen and sportswomen who have made great contribution to the country, like Seng Koon.

Seng Koon, who played doubles, told reporters that it took the Thomas Cup players three weeks to make the trip to the United Kindom by sea in 1948.

Seng Koon was formerly the Ipoh bureau chief of the defunct Echo.

Finally, the proposed High Performance Training Centre (HPTC) in Brickendonbury outside London, originally slated to cost RM490 million but later scaled down and projected to cost RM70 million, has been laid to rest.

The reasons given by the new Youth and Sports Minister Datuk Ismail Sabri Yaakob scrapping the HPTC project is exactly what critics and opponents of the project had said both in and out of Parliament – that it is an extravagant and unnecessary expenditure which had nothing to do with raising the standards of Malaysian sports!

A special tribute must be given to crusading journalists like R. Nadeswaran of The Sun who had persevered in their high-quality investigative journalism under the most difficult of circumstances to expose the series of lies, half-truths and misinformation which proponents of the project had been spinning in the country in support of the folly.

Although Ismail said he was checking on the amount incurred on consultants, travel and other expenses in pursuing the project, giving an undertaking that they will be made public, it is most extraordinary that the new Sports Minister has difficulty in getting the latest update of the total expenditures incurred in the project.

There is no reason why Ismail could not have got these figures as he had been appointed Sports Minister for more than four weeks, with three intervening Cabinet meetings. Furthermore, there is only a change of a Minister and no change of government with consequential disappearance of files, as happened in some of the states where the Barisan Nasional had lost state power in the March 8 politicial tsunami. Read the rest of this entry »

“Another bashing” (Sunday Star) and “ANOTHER HUMILIATION” (New Sunday Times) — screaming headlines for Malaysia’s 5-0 thrashing by Uzbekistan in the Asian Cup Group C match yesterday after the earlier 1-5 thrashing by China.

But is Brickendonbury the answer to end the slaughter of Malaysian football — with the national Under-15 football squad leaving for London tonight, according to the following Bernama report yesterday: Read the rest of this entry »