| Business |
Onward and upward
ALL hail, Team Papua New Guinea!
The cream of PNG sports performers have risen to the top and
performed with distinction.
Others have come close to gathering gold for their homeland.
And then there have been others who have under-performed.
There is no shame in doing less than one’s best at a big
international sports meeting.
To be there at all, particularly in terms of the developing
world, is an amazing achievement.
Sportsmen and women who grow up in remote villages, who must
pace themselves against willing but not always outstanding home
competition, who learn to run on bush tracks and swim in rivers
and the sea – these people are deservedly
heroes in their own land.
Apia is not Mount Olympus.
Those of us who sit at home glued to our radios or scan our
newspapers often feel so interactive, so involved with our elite
sports performers and their events, that we might just as well
be on that track or warming up in that pool.
There will doubtless be an outburst of fury at lawn bowls
champion and gold medal favourite Peter Juni.
Juni allegedly drank alcohol while competing.
That incident should never have happened.
But we suggest that it is much more of a personal tragedy for
Peter Juni than a slap in the face for his homeland.
It is natural that many will be angered by this sportsman’s
ill-advised action.
We hope that nobody will be angered by the perfectly correct and
entirely admirable decision made public by Tamzin Wardley, the
PNG chef de mission.
The terms and conditions imposed upon our representatives at
Apia were unequivocal and had been made abun-
dantly clear to each individual team member long before Games
participants left our shores.
The decision to withdraw Juni from the singles competition would
have been a heartbreaking one for Wardley and for the tribunal
members who reached the decision.
But that was the one path open to the officials to safeguard
something bigger and far more important that Peter Juni’s Apia
reputation – the good name and reputation for sportsmanship of
PNG and its people.
So it is this sportsman’s name, this team member who had already
distinguished himself by joining Pomat Topal in winning gold in
the bowls pairs at Apia, who is sadly the target of national
anger.
And it is, in the short term, his reputation that has been
blackened.
We hope that he will be able to recover his good name following
this incident and represent our country once again in the
future.
And we hope that others who in future will represent this
country will remember that they are not just elite sportsmen and
women.
They are inevitably analysed as representative of their people
and their country.
The bowls fracas aside, our team has much of which to be proud.
Did you notice the reaction of Mae Koime to being pipped at the
post by 0.02 of a second in the 100 metres sprint?
Koime expressed “shock” at being beaten after having led for
most of the race.
That’s a very human and honest reaction from a top athlete, and
it’s even more commendable when Koime added: “It’s over and done
with – now I have to look forward to new challenges ... I’ve a
long way to go and will make up for it at the 2009 mini SP Games
at Wallis and Futuna and in the South Pacific Games in 2011 in
New Caledonia.”
That’s the spirit that will ultimately lead PNG to the very top
of the performance lists.
Gold medals are a splendid personal reward for the 4am training
sessions on the track or in the pool or heaving weights above
your head.
They are a just reward for fine-tuning a bowl, or smashing a
tennis ace, or wiping a squash competitor off the courts.
But in the final assessment all that we, the chair-bound but
interactive observers have any right to ask, is that our teams
and our individual performers do their best, remember their
homeland and make us all proud by their performances.
And that is what PNG Games Team 2007 has achieved for each and
every Papua New Guinean.
 
|
