Malaysia and the surreal side of the Olympics

THE GODS of the International Olympic Committee hurled thunderbolts from the heavens recently, officially recognizing the World Disc Federation.

This means that the federation’s signature sport—Ultimate Frisbee—might actually be in the next Summer Olympic Games after Rio de Janeiro next year.

The IOC’s latest earth-shaking move immediately drew playful consensus from punsters.

A late-night television comedian said the game—in which grown men and women toss and catch a plastic disc—will be the first Olympic sport “where athletes are disqualified for NOT testing positive on drugs.”

Another midnight jokester said Ultimate Frisbee will rival in excitement other regular Olympic sports like trampoline and rhythmic dancing.

The gagsters are dead right. There are sanctioned Olympic sports that are just straight-up dumb. But the Games have a surreal side, and to the IOC and its marketing geniuses, these sports make sense.

Why? It is probably because they are played and watched in some of the world’s largest economies, the headquarters, incidentally to the biggest Olympic commercial sponsors.

Our neck of the Olympic woods is also home to games that make athletes playing them look silly.

I am talking about the Southeast Asian specialties like vovinam, sepak takraw, pencak silat, and chinlone—games that unfortunately will not get IOC blessing in a million years.

Don’t get me wrong. Athletes who compete in these sports have great skills although they will not help their respective countries prepare for the next level—the Asian Games and the legit part of the Olympics.

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That is why Malaysia’s major goal when it hosts the 2017 Southeast Asian Games is worthy of support.

The move by the Olympic Council of Malaysia to shy away from traditional sports and concentrate instead on the Olympic disciplines must be endorsed by the 11 countries, including the Philippines, that go to the biennial meet.

The SEA Games is usually meant for regional friendship and bragging rights, not for sporting excellence.

Every two years, the host country gets to execute its own version of the dreaded dagdag-bawas (add-subtract) routine, erasing some Olympic events in favor of the specialties with strange sounding names.

The scheme is as old as the SEA Games itself, the host country enhancing its medal harvest with exotic, native games foreign to its neighbors, to hold off rivals breathing down its neck in the overall medal tally.

Installing new SEA Games priorities will be tricky. But Malaysia has the potential to change the present mind-set because it has placed little focus on becoming the meet’s overall champion.

Instead, it has made it a higher priority to do well in the Olympic events. Malaysia has hosted the SEA Games five times and has landed in the top spot only once, during the version it hosted in Kuala Lumpur in 2001.