MICHAEL PHELPS…. no, just kidding.

Posted by HELiX

I know it’s never funny to make fun of physically disabled people, so that leaves me with no choice but to make fun of our country’s first medal-winning team in forty-eight years.

Don’t believe the media when they say that we’ve never won an Olympiad medal in a long time. We do, every bloody year.

Forty-eight years. Holy crap. That’s more than half the age of Lee Kuan Yew, which puts Americans to shame when they think having a 72 year-old Republican nominee involved in politics is a big deal. I’m entirely unhappy about the fact that our government didn’t declare any public holidays in view of our country’s success at the Beijing Olympics.

Definition of Old

Amidst all the media hype over a Silver medal and a whopping multi-million dollar award handed out to China-born Chinese (that’s like saying, Original KFC Chicken as opposed to the crispy version that we are), we overlook things.

Natalia Partyka is this non-Chinese table tennis player from Poland. It’s something like having a white guy in the track events. And if that isn’t special enough for you, here’s something more:

Now you’re probably like ‘Oh my god’, but the proper attitude here is ‘Oh my god, she has a ring on her ring-finger’.

Partyka was born 19 years ago with her right forearm missing. Yet her disability did not prevent her from chasing table tennis success after falling in love with the sport as a 7 year-old. And if my logic doesn’t fail me, that also means that she married Table Tennis.

Another athlete to note is Natalie du Toit, a South African swimmer who… swims. Partly because she has an easier time in the water than on land.

She swims in the 10 kilometres open water event which is going to start in… about an hour’s time. And 10 kilometres is quite long.

Back to Partyka. I still can’t imagine how she plays table tennis, especially for serves, but she does it. I only know this much: To serve, she uses the stump of her right arm to toss the ball in the air before spinning it across the net with a ferocious flick of her left wrist.

It’s pretty much like how Green Goblin attacks Spiderman, except that she does it without an awesome-flying-hovering-madness platform thing, arms and a costume that makes you look stupider than a guy who wears red-blue skin-tight suit.

What’s more, and this is probably the most important part, so listen up: The Gdansk native shot to prominence in January when she defeated world No. 8 Li Jia Wei of Singapore at the World Championships in China.

Now you’re probably like ‘Oh my god’, but the proper attitude here is ‘Oh my god, she’s 19 years-old and she’s married?!’.

But really now. I didn’t see that coming. The Straits Times has kindly reminded us that our Golden Girls have won their Chinese (as in, the ones who stayed on in China) counterparts at the World Championships, which left the question hanging… if they defeated the best in the world, who could have stood in their way? Why didn’t we go on to clinch the top position at the World Championships then?

Looks like we have our answer now.

8:24 PM 8 August 2008