Tuesday, August 26, 2008

A Silver Singapore

Over a hundred American Olympic athletes are returning home this week with medals. That's quite a lot, but not something unique to the USA. We usually have a large showing of talented stars at every Olympics and usually come home with LOTS of medals (even before the Phelps machine was around).

Now that I live in Singapore, I am realizing just how cool that is.
Singapore won it's first medal in 48 years in Beijing. It's first medal in 48 years! We're not talking it's first gold medal, we're just saying medal, period.

They got a Silver in....guess what. Ping pong. Yeah, ping pong. No shocker there. Those Asian kids are AMAZING "table tennis" (as they call it here) players.

Here's a pic I got from Xinhua of the Singapore table tennis star:


It's actually a pretty intense little game that they play. It's not at all like the "see how many times we can make it back and forth" games we used to play in Grandma Jackie's basement. These kids do tricks and fake-outs. Most of the time, I couldn't even follow where the ball was.

Needless to say, the Singaporeans were crazy excited. They keep playing the flag ceremony (the one with the Singapore flag to the side of the gold medal-winning flag) in commercials. They are mighty proud. Congratulations Singapore.

2 comments:

Cori said...

Ahhh, someone is developing a soft spot for Singapore.
That would be pretty cool, though, to bring home the first medal in half a century.

Megan said...

Well Aaron just decided to tell me...the chick that won that one medal in 48 years has only been a citizen of Singapore for about a year. She's actually from China. Isn't that nice? I might just take it all back and delete the post now.