Four Continents

The Four Continents Figure skating championships took place in Taipei this past weekend. Taiwanese American Crystal Kiang took 20th. Here is her short program at around 8:25

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NTW1Gcahnk

No falls but unfortunately two of her jumps were landed double footed. Clean double axle at the end and an interesting spinning position at around 11:51 highlighted the second of half of the short program.

Jui-Shu Chen, Jordan Ju, and Chih-I Tsao represented the Taiwanese men. The placed 25th, 22nd, and 18th respectively.

Te-An Lien qualifies!!!

Remember how last year I said I wanted Luger Lien Te-An to qualify for the 2014 Sochi Olympics?

Well he has! At the 11th hour he has qualified to take part in the Olympic Games two weeks from now. After Slovenia and United Kingdom decided not to use their qualification quota, their spots were reallocated with Taiwan getting one of those spots!

Lien Te-An joins two other Taiwanese athletes at these games. ( More about them later)  This will be the biggest Taiwanese team since 2002.

As Lien Te-An is still a young athlete hopefully this Olympic experience will be the first of a couple more in his career!

World Gymnastics Championships

This year the World Gymnastic Championships were held in Belgium. Taiwan sent a team of three males and two females to the event and here are two videos of their performance. Thanks to the wonderful piibunina for recording these gymnasts.

This is Lo Yu Ju on the floor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AziJegJAiw

This is Chen Yu Chun on the balance beam. This was Taiwan's best showing as she managed a top 60 finish on the event.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-tD7w3pSn8

Analysis:
Really impressed with Chen on the balance beam. She has sufficient difficulty as all of her acrobatic elements are rated D or higher. She needs to work on her leaps (greater than 180 degrees) and keep her toes more pointed throughout the routine. Also she could work on connecting some of her element such that her start score is higher.

As for Lo, her piano music is really endearing. She needs to be able to do four tumbling passes instead of three in order to improve. On her second pass where she leaps out of her front salto, the free leg needs to be higher in order to gain the connection bonus. Of most concern is her last pass where she does a 2.5 twists. In the video, it shows that she was to take a step sideways when landing. This is not good as it makes the knee susceptible to major injuries like ACL tears.

Overall, these are really solid performances for Taiwan who doesn't have a strong gymnastics background and there's definitely room for improvement.

NBA Season has begun

Jeremy Lin has done really solid so far. He is averaging around 18 points per game and his team the Houston Rockets are now 7-4. Jeremy's assist to turnover ratio is a bit high (around 5:3.5), so there's always room to improve!

By the way, can you spot the error in this article?

http://focustaiwan.tw/news/apst/201311170024.aspx


Answer:

"He was the second Asian American to win this honor after Yao Ming of China. "

Ummm....Yao Ming is not American.

Cool Montage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEQaVGydME0&list=WL72AAE1F10C860A3D

Really Liked this montage Taiwanese TV had for the 2012 Olympics last year. Most of the athletes are listed and have a picture competing. Notable ones missing are Tennis player Chuang Chia-Jung, Sailor Chang Hao, and all of the swimmers!

My Reaction to IOC's Decision to Potentially Drop Wrestling

The IOC executive board decided to put wrestling on a voting block with six other sports to decide which one will be on the 2020 Olympic program. Sports that were also close to being expelled were canoeing, modern pentathlon, taekwondo, and field hockey.  Other sports mentioned by the media to be in trouble were badminton, fencing, and cycling.

Since wrestling is not a traditional sport in Taiwan, I don't really have any strong feelings about this decision. I do feel puzzled about why wrestling and it does have historical ties to the Olympics. This sport holds true to the statement "higher, faster, stronger."

My strongest reactions are to some of the online comments people have posted. Nothing against wrestling but some of the comments are just plain idiotic. Here are some example:

"They choose curling over wrestling."

-Um…..we're talking about the summer Olympics not the winter Olympics. Curling wasn't even talked about at the executive meeting.

"They choose synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics over wrestling."

-This statement is misleading. The board was all about kicking out a sports federation. So kicking out rhythmic gymnastics would mean kicking out the FIG, which at the same time would be kicking out every gymnastics discipline. No FIG means no Gabby Douglas. Same thing for synchronized swimming which is under FINA. If FINA was dropped, all the swimming events would have been dropped. Yes that means no Michael Phelps or Ian Crocker.

"Nobody watches badminton and table tennis except for China."

-This statement is just so wrong on so many levels. Yes it is popular in China but it's also popular in the rest of Asia-Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Singapore…… Even countries such as Germany and Denmark have strong traditions in this sport.

Also these sports have professional tours. These tour stops have sponsors and television contracts.  In addition to World Championships, badminton has the prestigious Thomas and Uber Cup for team events. I could go on. Wrestling has no such thing.

"Badminton needs to be replace due to the 2012 scandal"

Wrestling has had its own scandals. From Muslims refusing to fight Israelis to a Swedish athlete dumping his medal onto the mat, wrestling needs to clean up too. Plus watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4SeUdCg2JU

Disgusting.

Plus the Great Britain team tried to hire a bunch of Ukrainians to wrestle for them in this past Olympics. It blew up in their face when one of them failed a drug test.

"Wrestling has had so many iconic moments like Rulon Gardner."

I say SO HAS EVERY SPORT! I know of touching stories in every sport.

And to those that say modern pentathlon and taekwondo needs to be replaced, these sports federation lobbied hard and have constantly changed the format of their competitions in an effort to become more relevant. Modern pentathlon has combined running and shooting into one event and taekwondo has added video replay. Wrestling has done no such thing. They refused to drop Greco-Roman when the IOC told them to and they have more weight classes for men than women.

Again I have no personal vendetta against wrestling but trying to justify one sport over another without doing proper information makes me frustrated.

So wrestling will be put up against sports like baseball/softball, roller sports, wake boarding, squash,  wushu, and rock climbing. I'm expecting an uproar from the wrestling community to get wrestling back in and I think they have a 70% chance of succeeding.

Sports that would benefit Taiwan would be baseball/softball and roller sports. Unfortunately, I don't think they'll succeed. The IOC just needs to raise the cap on the number of sports.

What's your thinking to the IOC's decision?

Taiwan Team Tennis

School has been busy for me :(

Last week the Taiwanese tennis teams competed in their respective Asian Divisonal zones. It was a rough week as the only match that Taiwan won was the women against South Korea. The Taiwanese men's team lost 5-0 to Australia and will face China in April in the loser's bracket.

With their win against South Korea, the women were able to stave off relegation and will be in the first tier in Asia again in 2014.

Of course none of the major stars played, so the results were to be expected. And I don't blame them. It was the New Years weekend. I wouldn't want to go to Kazakhstan (women) during the biggest holiday of the year.

Anyways, Su-Wei is playing in Qatar. Battling through injury she beat Tatjana Malek of Germany 6-4 6-4.