Sports To Build Bonds

Sports are recognised globally as a low-cost and high-impact tool for development and a powerful agent for social change. Not only are sports a socially accepted activity that brings people together, they also help unite families, communities and nations. Sports cover a wide range of physical activities, which can be both competitive and recreational. Sports can be practiced at local, national and international levels in all the forms that exist - athletics, badminton, basketball, diving, football, sepak takraw, swimming, badminton, tennis, archery and more.

The Olympic motto is composed of three words in Latin: CITIUS – ALTIUS - FORTIUS, or FASTER – HIGHER – STRONGER in English. These words encourage participants to give their best when they compete. To better understand the motto, we can compare it with the Olympic maxim: The most essential objective in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the fundamental thing in life is not conquering but fighting well. Giving one’s best and striving for personal excellence form a commendable goal. This is a message which still holds true today, not just for athletes but for every one of us.

Canadian sailor Lawrence Lemieux took the Olympic maxim and message to heart during the 1988 Games in Seoul. He decided that it was more important to abandon personal Olympic glory and to aid fellow sportsmen who were in dire straits. The Canadian was on course to win the silver medal in the Finn class competition, despite the rough seas, when he heard the cries of Shaw Her Siew and Joseph Chan, two Singaporean sailors who were competing in another race. One of them was desperately holding on for dear life to his boat, which had capsized under 6-ft. waves. The other had drifted 50 feet, swept away by the currents. Instead of staying in his race, Lemieux made haste towards the sailors and pulled them out of the water. Lemieux then waited for rescue boats to arrive. He was in 23rd place by that time. But Lemieux’s bravery and selflessness did not go unrewarded. The Olympic committee decided to present him with the (Olympic Games’ founder) Baron Pierre de Coubertin medal, a special award for sportsmanship.

Lawrence’s sacrifice remains one of the greatest moments of Olympic History Despite the lofty goals that the Olympic Games try to uphold, there have been many instances where the Games have been politicized and sports end up as the big loser. Choosing not to attend the Olympics is one of the most popular and simple ways to make a big international political statement. In 1976, many sovereign African nations boycotted the games in Montreal, in reaction to the International Olympic Committee’s refusal to ban New Zealand, whose rugby team had been touring South Africa, a country that had been excluded from many international sporting events due to implementation of its apartheid policy. In 1980, 62 countries including the USA boycotted the Moscow Games in protest at the USSR’S invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 while in 1984 the Russians retaliated in kind by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympic Games. Like Montreal and Moscow, the winners in Los Angeles could not boast that their gold medals were achieved against the toughest competition the world had to offer.