KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia will not press the panic button although only five athletes have so far qualified for next year’s Beijing Olympic Games. Tunku Tan Sri Imran Tuanku Ja’afar, the Olympic Council of Malaysia (OCM) president, remains confident that more athletes will qualify for the Games. And he has thrown a challenge to the hockey team to qualify for the Games.
“The hockey team won a bronze at the recent Asia Cup (in India). That’s good news for us. They still have one more shot at making the Olympics. It will be tough but I challenge them to raise the bar even higher,” said Tunku Imran yesterday. 
The Malaysian hockey team will be taking part in one of the three Olympic qualifiers – New Zealand from Feb 2-10, Chile from March 1-9 and Japan from April 5-13. The winners at the respective venues will get to compete in the Olympics.
Tunku Imran, however, expressed disappointment that the artistic gymnasts and shooters failed to come good in their recent Olympic qualifying tournaments.
“It’s still early days as some of the sports have yet to hold their qualifying tournaments. We expect some from badminton. I am confident that we will have about the same of number of athletes like we did for the 2004 Athens Olympics,” he said. “For now, I urge the athletes to double their efforts. It is a great honour to be an Olympian.”
In Athens, Malaysia were represented by 26 athletes.
The five athletes who have qualified for the Beijing Games are swimmer Daniel Bego, diver Bryan Nickson, pole vaulter Roslinda Samsu and archers Cheng Chu Sian and Mohd Marbawi Sulaiman.
Yesterday, Tunku Imran’s efforts to fan the athletes’ fire received a boost with the launch of the Olympic Torch Relay campaign by Samsung Malaysia Electronics at the OCM’s museum.
“Malaysia is one of the 23 cities to organise the Olympic Torch Relay and we will have our first-ever Olympic torch run in Kuala Lumpur on April 21. We are happy that Samsung is working together with us to bring people from different walks of life to be the torch bearers,” said Tunku Imran.
From April leading to the Beijing Games in August, the Olympic Torch Relay will travel through 23 cities in 20 nations and 113 cities in China.
The OCM will identify 80 torch bearers (national athletes, community, sponsors and sports officials) to run a distance of 20km – with each torch bearer covering a distance of 250m.
Samsung will name a total of 18 torch bearers, including five local sport icons. The remaining slots are open to the public via a competition on www.samsung.com/my.
The Star
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