Having Hysterics

Have you ever watched someone have hysterics? Maybe not, as it’s quite rare to witness it. 

It is defined as someone being “affected by or deriving from wildly uncontrolled emotion.”

From what I hear about the TMD and KMT’s most recent outbursts, both of them must be borderline hysterical because they are so frustrated at people laughing at their efforts to score political points. 

It’s like watching mad Uncle Roger at a family wedding drinking an entire bottle of Baijiu and yelling abuse at everyone towards the end of the evening.  

From what I hear, our Olympic hopeful the Badminton Princess sent a selfie from the plane and said how much she missed travelling business class. Even for a short 3 hour 15 minute flight it would have been nice, but the real implications quickly became apparent, and it turned out that half the Olympic committee were in business class. 

That is utterly shameful and it is them who should be criticized. There have been enough stories over the years of corruption surrounding the Olympics and Tokyo has been no different with all sorts of allegations now flying around. 

It is quite right to call out the Olympic committee and there should be an investigation on how this happened and if indeed the Athletes were treated as second class to the officials, coaches and doctors.

According to the Olympic Charter, every National Olympic Committee (NOC) must be free from government interference. But surveys have shown that at least one in seven NOCs have leaders with formal ties to their national governments.

The official in charge of sport affairs has offered to resign. Quite right too. Maybe there is a lesson here given the Olympic Charter, and Taiwan should quickly act to completely separate the NOC here from the Government.  

All well and good. An opposition doing its job and calling something out that needed calling out.

But then like a boxer who has landed a few punches, they started showboating and became massively overconfident and began to swing wildly. 

HOW DARE THE GOVERNMENT PUT HER IN A ROOM LIKE THAT? They screamed when Badminton Girl sent a picture of her hotel room. 

Their screaming fits of rage quickly turned to red-faced embarrassment when she meekly told everyone she chose that particular hotel because it was nearer the training ground than the other hotels on offer. 

Did it not occur to them to check? Clearly not...sorry, that was a rhetorical question. I seem to be asking rhetorical questions a lot lately like “Are they stupid?” “Do they not think?” “Are these people eight years old?”

Then came the food. HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GIVE HER FOOD LIKE THAT? They screamed at the government. 

There was even one young KMT official who set himself up as some kind of athlete's nutritional expert and opined that the contents of the bento box were not what an athlete would eat. As someone who is quite clearly not that cautious about what he pushes into his face, I have to wonder if he should be setting himself up as some kind of advisor on what Olympian Miss Tai should, or should not be eating. 

The KMT often lets itself down by allowing these kinds of people to publicly air their views. They need better thinkers in these positions, and certainly more mature ones.   

Er, the bento box came from The Okura Hotel, one of the finest hotels in Tokyo and Tai was more than happy with it. I was lucky enough to have stayed there on more than one occasion when I was a senior editor and very nice it was too. 

On top of that, with a simple check on the Okura website, some bento boxes cost over 10,000 yen which is about TW$ 2,500. Yes guys, that was a real slap in the face pointing that one out. 

Talk about an unedifying episode. The amount of egg on their faces is truly laughable and pretty much negates any good they did raising the issue of the flight. 

Any coach will tell you don’t get cocky, and don’t celebrate too early...it’s a great way to lose or look stupid.  

What really worries me about all this is the heavy politicising of everything that moves, and in this case sport. They have already heavily politicised healthcare through Covid and are proving yet again they are simply desperate to lower themselves to the level of a bar brawl pretty much every day. 

Having an opposition that is ineffective at doing what it is supposed to be doing in terms of keeping the government of the day accountable and coming up with constructive criticism and not just throwing ill-thought out insults with no checking of facts.

In this ugly case the flight news was scandalous, rightly called out and there should be resignations and a change in government policy on how the Olympic committee here operates. After that, they should have shut up and avoided embarrassing themselves by dragging it on and on.   

I can only hope that by doing all this they have not upset poor Miss Tai who has been working and training for most of her life towards this Olympics. She needs to be as mentally prepared for her moment as she needs to be physically prepared.  

I can only hope they haven’t ruined her chances by dragging her into this protracted nonsense as ridiculous politicians desperately try to score political points and use her as a weapon. 

I would beg the Taiwan media in Tokyo not to ask her questions about all this. 

We need to leave her alone and allow her to get her head in the right space and not looking at her phone the whole time in case another political storm has blown up around her.   

I wish her the very best of luck.  

Tinkerty Tonk…