The Reality of Malaysian Sports

Host of the 1998 Commonwealth Games

This corner of cyberspace is a labour of love, dedicated to fans of Malaysian sports. As such, please excuse any mistakes or omissions.

Soccer - Malaysia's no.1 spectator sport
Badminton - Malaysia's number 2 sport
Squash
Hockey
Athletics
Table tennis - will do when I have the time and energy. By the way, the top player in Malaysia is an import from China (Liu Junhui). Hall of fame includes Peong Tak Seng.

Rugby

Japan thrashed us in the Asia Cup 1995, then the All Blacks mauled Japan 145-17 in Rugby World Cup 1995; then South Africa outclassed the All Blacks in the final. That just shows how much work we need to do to even give the likes of Western Samoa a decent opposition.

Rugby World Cup 1995 results

Volleyball

I think the players at the World Youth Volleyball Championship 1995 held in our country are better than our national team...

National Volleyball League 1995

Final: Intel 3-2 Petronas 15-11, 15-12, 7-15, 9-15, 15-13

3&4: AMFB 3-0 BSN 15-6, 15-4, 15-6

Basketball

SEA Games 1995

If we still cannot beat the Phillipines, what hope do we have against Russia or Croatia? Or even China or Japan? Not to mention the team with the likes of "His Airness", "Prince Charles", "The Dreamer" or "Magic".

Exhaustive information on the best basketball league in the world and its players can be found at http://www.nba.com/indextext.html.

Bowling

Asian FIQ Championship 1996

Shalin Zulkifli averaged 235.67 points - a world record on way to win singles gold.

Triathlon

Razani Hussain, 29 is Malaysia's undisputed #1. Look at his day's workout: 7am-10am is running, followed by breakfast; 12pm-2pm is cycling and 3pm-4.30pm is swimming; plus some weight training thrown in if he's got time.

Best international finish: 4th in an Asian-level Triathlon (top three were occupied by Japanese).

Sepaktakraw

World Sepaktakraw Championship (KL) 1994

Group: M'sia A bt Thailand 15-8, 15-5

SF1: M'sia B bt Thailand 15-6, 17-15

SF2: M'sia A bt Singapore 15-?, 15-8

3&4: Thailand bt SIngapore 15-3, 15-0

Final: M'sia B bt M'sia A 9-15, 15-9, 15-7

Sea Games 1995

Malaysia lost to Thailand in both inter-regu and team ties. For the 1st time in 10 years, Malaysia has failed to win at least a gold.

Interteam: Ahmad Jais Baharom, Zabidi Shariff,? lost 10-15, 14-17. I saw some tears there.

Interregu: lost to Singapore 11-15, 15-10, 7-15 in the semis which left us shell-shocked. In the final, Singapore were easy meat for Thailand when they won 15-1, 15-5. Singapore's fast "hit-the-net-first" serves were not good enough to stop the Thais who had better all round skills. Thai's spin serves also also worked well. Our serves are nothing special - just flat balls and no power. Overall, I think we are 2nd best (better than S'pore). It's just that we were overconfident and cracked under pressure in the rubber.

Time and time again we see our sportsmen defeated before they went for battle. Mental strength is not one of our sportsmens' forte.

Taekwondo

Tamparuli-born Elizabeth Chua won a bronze medal in the SEA Games 1995. Another Tamparuli lass, [forgot her name] used to fight for Sabah.

My taekwondo coach at SBPS KK, Voon Nyuk Choi was a member of the national team. My uncle, Justin Godomon is a certified taekwondo coach.

South Korea, unsurprisingly is the world power in this sport.

Karate

Sabahan Michelle Koh is ranked 5th in the world in kata. Now married to Scott Ollerenshaw in early 1996.

Japan, unsurprisingly is the world power in the heavyweight class of this sport.

Weightlifting

Matin Guntali had a disappointing outing in the SEA Games 1995 when he failed to win any medal.

Tennis

Adam Malik is ranked #800++

Asian Games 1994

2-1 Phillipines (minor upset)

2-1 South Korea (top seed, major upset)

SF: 0-3 India (3rd seed)

Swimming

SEA Games performances: Nurul Huda Abdullah won 7 golds in 1985, 8 in 1987 and 8 in 1989, a total of 23 golds!!! However, she's only good enough for silver and bronzes at Asian level. At world level? Well, definitely not good enough.

Medal Hauls

SEA Games

1995 : 31-39-69. Thai was 1st with 155 golds! Indonesia 2nd with 77 golds and Phillipines 3rd with 32 golds. There were 353 golds on offer.

KL 89: was our best performance with 67 golds, 2nd behind Indonesia who collected 102 golds.

Jakarta 87: Indonesia's greatest ever gold haul with 185!

Bangkok 85: we got 26 golds out of 250 on offer

Asian Games

1994: 3-1-10. Most of our golds came from bowling, and one from sailing (the precocious Ryan Tan). This is our 3rd best finish after the 1966 and 1970 games.

1966 was our best ever haul with 7-6-4.

Commonwealth Games

Apart from badminton, do we have gold clout in any of the other sports?

Olympic Games

Will we ever see an Olympic gold medal brought back home?

Others

Okay I know professional freestyle wrestling is nonexistent here but I just thought you might like to read about some of these explosive match-ups.

Also I thought you might be interested to read a bit about pro heavyweight boxing.

Greatest Sporting Moments

1988 Olympics. Florence Griffith-Joyner laughed her way to double world records in the 100 & 200, completely outdoing the likes of Ashford, Ottey, Torrence and Dreschler. Why, her times of 10.49s (100m) and 21.34s (200m) can beat all except a select few of our MALE sprinters. In fact, it equalled, at that time, our 21-year-old national 100m record held by Dr. M. Jegathesan!!!

1992 Olympics Basketball. The greatest basketball team ever assembled, Dream Team I (Jordan, Johnson, Barkley, Bird, Pippen, Ewing, Robinson & co) destroyed the competition by an average score of 110+-70+ (that's 40 points difference!), and beat Croatia (who had NBA stars Toni Kukoc and Dino Radja, both 6'11" centres) by a 20+ pt margin in the final.

1991 World Athletics Championships, Tokyo, the greatest ever men's 100m race. 6 men dipped under 10.00s. Just look at the lineup: Lewis, Burrell, Christie, Fredericks, Da Silva, Adeniken ++. The winning time: a world record 9.86 by Lewis. And in the same championship, the titanic battle in the long jump where Lewis's form produced his personal best (8.83m) was not good enough to stop Mike Powell's 8.95m.

1996 Olympics. Basketball group match: Dream Team III awoke from its slumber and bulldozed through China, the best team in Asia by 60 points!!!

1998 NBA Final game. Michael Jordan again proved why he's the greatest player of all time by propelling Chicago Bulls to their 6th championship in 8 years. He scored 45 points in that final match and also most of the last few points.

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