The Olympic Passport (article for reference)

The Olympic passport
The number of foreign-born athletes competing in the Games has raised eyebrows. But in a borderless world, why shouldn't sports be just as globalised?
By Tan Dawn Wei, expat eye

This year's Olympic table tennis matches will be remembered as much for some formidable play as a battle amojng the Chinese.
That's the Chinese-Singaporean, Chinese-French, Chinese-Austrian, Chinese-American, Chinese-Spaniard, Chinese-Australian, Chinese- German, Chinese-Polish, Chinese Canadian, Chinese-Korean, Chinese-Hong Konger, Chinese-Luxembourger, Chinese-Dutch, Chinese- Dominican, Chinese-Croatian and Chinese-Congolese.
The oft-bandied phrase, 'the Chinese are everywhere', is nothing if not glaringly apparent at the Beijing table tennis games.
Of the 78 women paddlers at this year's Olympics, 35 are China- born. Only three wear China's red and yellow colours.
Past Olympic Games have borne witness to such ironic scenes before, but quite possibly none more than in the Chinese capital.
And it's not just at the ping-pong table.
When the members of the press descended on Chaoyang Park for what they thought would be a politically charged beach volleyball match between Georgia and Russia after the latter sent tanks into the former's territory, they saw none of that from the Brazilian players representing Georgia.
Then, there were the New Zealand-born triathlete brothers who competed against each other: one, Shane Reed, doing it for his home country, the other, Matt, for the United States.
Armenian wrestler Ara Abrahamian won a bronze medal for Sweden (which he was later stripped of for throwing it on the mat); Jamaican Germaine Mason gave Great Britain a silver and its first high-jump medal since 1996; and Moroccan Rashid Ramzi ran to a gold in the 1,500m race for Bahrain.
Of course, the table tennis trio of Li Jiawei, Wang Yuegu and Feng Tianwei - former Chinese, now Singaporeans - broke this country's dry Olympic medal spell of 48 years with a team silver.
The United States also fielded a brigade of migrants - 36 from 28 countries - this year: among them, Lopez Lomong, the Sudanese-born American flag-bearer at the opening ceremony, plus a South African-born tennis player, a Georgian archer, a Polish kayaker, Chinese table tennis players and a world champion Kenyan distance runner.
All this trading of nationalities has led to much criticism and derision from purists, stakeholders and even the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
It is one thing to find a new home as a conventional migrant, but another to be bought over purely for your athletic talents.
No one raised a stink when Nastia Liukin, a Russian immigrant, won a gold medal in individual all-round gymnastics for the US a week ago.
She had moved to New Orleans when she was 21/2 years old with her family after the Soviet Union broke up and is as American as apple pie.
But Americans have been far less kind to two other of its basketball players who crossed over from the US to Russia.
Becky Hammon and J.R. Holden have had to defend themselves repeatedly from being labelled 'traitors' when they donned Russian colours at this year's Games.
Hammon, who wasn't drafted into the US national team, had said: 'I still love my country - it doesn't really have anything to do with that. I just want to play basketball.'
The Olympics, it seems, are no longer about patriotism, national identity or making your motherland proud.
Instead, it has become what The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Jeff Schultz calls 'an exercise in passport free agency'.
Fingers have been wagging in the direction of rich Middle Eastern countries, which have thrown wads of cash at poor African athletes in a bid for national glory.
Former world steeplechase champion Stephen Cherono, who traded his Kenyan jersey for a Qatari one and adopted a new name, Saif Saaeed Shaheen, for a lifetime salary of US$1,000 (S$1,400) a month, is just one of them.
There have been enough cases of Cheronos to make the IOC take action: It ruled in 2002 that athletes must wait three years from receiving their new citizenship papers before they can compete for their adoptive country - unless their home country waives this deadline.
IOC president Jacques Rogge said the committee introduced the rule to prevent athletes from 'changing nationality for purely financial reasons'.
'It is a worrying situation emerging in sport,' he had remarked.
Likewise, the International Table Tennis Federation has also put its foot down. After the Olympics, those over the age of 21 will be banned from pledging allegiance to another country.
Those between 18 and 20 will have to wait seven years before they can make the jump.
Other sports federations are also likely to follow suit.
But there is something to be said about this globalisation of sports.
When the world is increasingly becoming a borderless one, why should the field of sports be any different? When people have traditionally migrated in search of a better life, more equitable opportunities and greater challenges, why can't sportsmen do the same?
Lawyer and economist Ian Ayres argued for flexibility in a New York Times column last Thursday, citing Article 6 in the Olympic Charter which states that the Games are competitions between athletes and not countries.
'Imagine a world where the best athletes are able to compete. This is definitely not the current Olympic system. The country quota system keeps many of the best athletes home,' he wrote.
'Letting athletes choose their national teams is a simple way of fulfilling this powerful idea,' he said of the Olympic Charter.
If not for Singapore's Foreign Sports Talent (FST) scheme, introduced in 1993 to fast-track promising foreign athletes to Singapore citizenship, the Republic's three new Olympic silver medallists would quite likely never have had the opportunity to take part in any Games.
The debate over Singapore's reliance on these imported athletes has been going on for the past decade, and the sports fraternity has reiterated the importance of these achievers to the development of sports here.
Much cynicism still hangs in the air - at coffee shops and on online forums - that Singapore didn't really win at the Olympics since all three paddlers were China-born.
Nowhere else, it seems, do you witness such disenchantment simply because the athletes bringing home the medals aren't native.
Perhaps it is because the table tennis win is Singapore's only one at these Games. Elsewhere, there could be less scrutiny when foreign-born and native athletes both come home with an assortment of medals.
But unlike Hammon, Holden and many others who hold two passports, Singapore's lack of a dual citizenship policy means foreign-born athletes have to give up one for another.
And surely that will qualify them as Singaporeans in more ways than one. Chinese-Singaporeans.