In 2012, fairly immediately after the London Olympics, I had written a little article on our top athletes’ achievements (and failures). It was an honest and sincere opinion of mine with only positive intents. I sent in the article to a couple of print media companies, but it never got published, for possibly the right reasons.

I then got a few friends to post the article on social media, here and there, and it got netizens debating. Some were in favour, some were against the opinionated piece and some interesting points and issues stemmed out of it.

Four years on, and following Malaysia’s best medal haul ever, I am compelled to write further, again with good intent and with all sincerity.

Much effort has been put in by various parties other than the athletes themselves for Malaysia to bring back the four silver and one bronze medals from Rio. From the political will right at the top, the engagement of trainers and coaches, family and teammates support and even down to the fans’ encouragement and chants.

All in all, it took up a lot of resources, time and money for that matter. These elements normally don’t come into our minds when we watch our athletes perform on screen. Yes, just on the screen, yet we so easily and freely pass comments on our athletes’ performances.

It was brilliant to see our youth and sports minister right there in the midst of it all to give support, and we even saw ex-shuttler, ‘Mr Wong’ (as the well learned ‘mat salleh’ commentator referred to him). Syabas to those who spent their time and resources to go all the way there to provide support to our “pahlawan” (again quoting the commentator).

So, we came back with a haul of silver medals and a bronze. These from a total of 32 athletes who managed to get there in the first place, a feat in itself. I am pretty sure many didn’t even realise we had a representative in the Marathon Swimming in Heidi Gan. If you’re wondering and thinking “huh??”, she took part in the 10km swim and came 21st out of 25 in the finals.

Commendable? Not many of us will even think much of it I suppose. And of course we had our golfers out there, too. How did they fare? Well, let’s not go there at all.

Instead, let’s just talk about badminton!!! Actually, better still let’s just talk about Lee Chong Wei. Well, that’s who most people have been talking (and writing) about anyway. His achievement in winning his third silver medal at three different Olympic Games in a row is much in the news.

Well, personally I would much prefer to talk about the other medallists, the men’s doubles pair of Goh V Shem and Tan Wee Kiong, and the mixed doubles pair of Chan Peng Soon and Goh Liu Ying. Our shuttlers who performed beyond rankings and definitely beyond targets. We should be talking (and celebrating) a lot more about their achievements as well as of Azizulhasni Awang’s bronze medal.

A bronze in the keirin (track-cycling) event is down-right amazing. Other than the fact that our ‘Pocket Rocket’ was diminutive in size when standing on the winners’ podium, he was competing against a list of cyclist laced with a real global presence.

He competed in the finals against Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany, Colombia and Poland. For that matter in round 2, he was the sole participant from Asia. (note that there is a Kierin league in Japan). By coming third out of 27 cyclists, he had effectively beaten those from the USA, Australia, France, Russia, Canada, New Zealand and a host of other nations.

For the record, Azizul is ranked fourth in the world in the last UCI’s ranking list, hence achieving better than his ranking or seeding.

Priceless in terms of achievements

Talking about ranking, our men’s doubles pair ranked 12th and our mixed doubles pair 11th in the IBF’s ranking list prior to Rio 2016. Goh VS and Tan WK brushed aside the world’s top pair along the way to the finals and Goh LY and Chan PS eventually lost to the Indonesian pair ranked eight places higher than them. The two silver medals are priceless in terms of achievements.

Now back to our ‘pahlawan’ Lee. Well, we all know he is ranked number 1 in the world. We also know that he had beaten Chen Long in the last five matches prior to Rio. We also may have even excused him had he succumbed (psychologically) to Lin Dan in the semifinals, but he did us (and himself) proud by defeating the number three ranked player to set up a finals against Chen Long.

All in all, he unfortunately did not achieve what he went to Rio to achieve. Simply put, KPI not met.

There is no doubt that Lee was under tremendous pressure to deliver. Other than the fact that he wanted to cement his career with the glory of Olympic gold, he would have put Malaysia on the top of the badminton medals tally at Rio (didn’t realise this right?) and he would have pushed Malaysia’s standing in the overall medal tally from 60th to joint 45th. (Note: had we taken three golds from badminton, Malaysia would be up in 27th spot.)

All in all we should be highlighting and celebrating our athletes equally if not appropriately. To glorify one over another, especially as the medal colour is the same is surely not healthy for the development of our sports. Other than medal winners such as those mentioned, as well as Pandelela Rinong and Cheong Jun Hoong who also brought us a silver medal, what about the rest?

All said and done, we have Tokyo 2020 to look forward to and looking positively ahead, a gold medal or two isn’t an unrealistic target now. 2020 is somewhat very apt for us to achieve this, and I for one am proud of all our Olympians, and thank you all for your dedication and hard work. You put us on the world map through this wonderful thing called sports.