When I went to the Olympics last year I only had tickets to two events. Handball and Athletics. I wanted tickets to other events, you could buy them off scalpers - who were mostly everyday people who had subscribed to tickets but then wanted to sell them to make a bit of cash. Scalping was banned officially, which was funny because there were literally hundreds of scalpers a few metres away from the entrance to the main stadiums, well in view of police. I remember seeing a report on Melissa Wu on CCTV so I thought that would be interesting to watch, I'll get a ticket for diving. I had also heard there were a few Australians playing table tennis so I went to look for those tickets as well. These are really popular sports in China and I couldn't find many tickets, those I did find were priced way out of my range so I didn't get to see those Olympians in action.
Here is a list I made up after scanning through the list of Australian Olympians (I may have missed some)
- ARCHERY Sky Kim
- BADMINTON Eugenia Tanaka
- DIVING Melissa Wu
- TABLE TENNIS Jian Fang Lay, Miao Miao, Stephanie Sang
- WRESTLINGFREESTYLE Sandeep Kumar
Most of these are imports, that is they grew up elsewhere and represented other countries before representing Australia. That's 7 out of a total 435 Australian Olympians, a very low number. From the 7, Melissa is the only one that is fully Australian. I'm not sure whether I should be happy (that there are asians representing) or sad (most of them are imports with very little Aussie culture and I don't identify with these people).
Hopefully at the next Olympics we'll see some more Australian born and 1.5 generation Australians representing.
Are we over-representing at the Maths Olympiad? Probably.
I also tried to find out details of coaches but could you believe it, there is no list of Olympic Coaches. Anyway, I know there are quite a few Asians in the non-existent Coaches list.
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