Olympic Aspirations

Let me clear up a misnomer: just because Singapore is closer to China than the United States does not mean there is better press or more excitement here concerning the Olympics. In fact, because Singapore has next-to-no athletes competing in the games*, the country actually shows very little interest in the games at all. An illustration: the other night, I went to a pub called Harry’s with Angela and two of her friends, Kan Kan and Chris, for drinks. At the pub, they had three large screens. Now, I would wager that in any U.S. bar, with the Olympics being as big of a deal as it is, at least one of those screens would have been showing some Olympic event or other, no matter what other sports events may be occurring at the time. At Harry’s, all three screens were showing a football (read: soccer) match. And no, it was not an Olympic football match; it was not even an international football match; it was a match between two English provinces. Imagine a pub showing only American football preseason games or minor league baseball when the Olympics are going on. I was beside myself.

What’s more, it’s not as if Singaporeans don’t have the facilities to become great Olympic athletes. Granted, their climate isn’t exactly ideal for intense training—I tried running today and made it approximately one mile before I felt as though I were about to have an asthma attack from the humidity—but they have much more space than I anticipated they would, and they certainly never have to worry about winter coming along and messing up any training schedules!

In Bukit Batok, the “community” where Angela lives, about three blocks from her house, is a community swimming center. I call it a center rather than just a pool, because it is actually comprised of three giant pools: a wading pool, a children’s pool, and a lap pool. The entry fee is incredibly inexpensive: one Sing dollar per visit, no membership needed. Therefore, I have taken advantage of this facility nearly every other day I have been here. Here, however, is the clincher: the lap pool is Olympic-sized. That’s right: it’s fifty meters long.

Now, one would think that if a community has an Olympic-sized pool as its community lap pool, it must have a good many hard-core swimmers in the area training for competition. This may be so, but if there are such swimmers around, I have not seen a single one. Instead, every time I go, I am faced with a variety of pseudo breast-strokers, mostly men, who bob up and down the pool, completely disregarding any lane markings and stopping on the walls for undetermined lengths of time right where I aim to do my flip turns. This, of course, is only possible because there are no lane ropes provided, so the whole experience comes down to one big Dodge the Swimmer game. If nothing else, it has given me a new appreciation for why all the bobbing Asian breast-strokers back in Rochester never seemed to have any concept of lane etiquette. Clearly no one is taught how to get out of an oncoming swimmer’s way, much less how to let one pass by you when you are going the same direction. And if they don’t know these skills, the it’s no wonder they don’t bother to try circle-swimming.

I still wonder, though: with such large lap pools available for every community block of homes, at such a cheap price, in such consistently nice weather…where are the athletes??? I feel like I’m back in my England conundrum, although at least people here think they are athletic. Several of them wear the attire and look very concentrated as they swim or jog or wave their arms in circles at their sides. I imagine that the swimmers here believe they are getting a workout, but their heart rates cannot possibly exceed 120 bpm.

America is just so sports-crazed. Are we the weird ones? But then again, there is always China, with its 24/7 training “schools” for youth Olympic hopefuls. We don’t do that to our children; instead, we have parents who sign their kids up for sports camps and lessons and clinics and teams. We have 24-hour sports channels and pay athletes exorbitant sums of money to lift heavier weights, to jump higher in the air, to run faster. We have bodybuilding shows, blogs for runners, Sports Illustrated, ESPN.com. Should we be focusing on something else? How to run our country a bit more like orderly, peaceful Singapore, perhaps?

*The Singapore government will not even send their water polo team, which is internationally ranked, because of the expense of sending an entire team of athletes; it opts instead to send a handful of individual athletes.