Asian Games: city’s medal haul gives reasons for cheer but reckoning awaits some

When Cado Lee Ka-to carries Hong Kong’s flag into the Paloma Mizuho Stadium on Sunday, he will do so at the head of what remains of the most successful Asian Games delegation in the city’s history.

While only a handful of the 580 athletes who made up the team will attend the closing ceremony, their impact will be felt far beyond the past fortnight, although it may be in what wasn’t achieved that a lasting legacy is created.

At first glance, an overall medal count of 54, only one more than the previous best of 53 in Hangzhou, might not necessarily warrant the jubilation that has been flowing through the Hong Kong camp in recent days.

But as with any number, it only tells part of the story. Within that lies a record 11 golds, three more than in 2023, and in Guangzhou in 2010 and Jakarta eight years later.

The 16 silvers have become 19, and bronze is down from 29 to 24, which earned the recipients a collective HK$37.5 million from the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s athlete incentive fund and showed what chef de mission Wong Po-kee said was “the continued emergence of sporting talent in Hong Kong”.

Sailing and windsurfing certainly provided reasons for optimism. Water sports were responsible for four of the golds collected in Japan, and the relative youth of the likes of Wong Tsz-ho and Cheung Tsz-yuet, boys’ and girls’ champions in the latter discipline, were a bright counterpoint to some of the disappointments of the Games.

The chef de mission’s words echoed those of city leader John Lee Ka-chiu, who in a lengthy social media post on Sunday hailed the example set by those athletes who had shown “everyone through their achievements: as long as you work hard and have dreams, you can break through your limits and achieve great results”.

“Regardless of the final results, the athletes’ achievements are a testament to their long-term hard work and their unwavering determination on the field,” Lee wrote, before thanking the squad for “showing us that Hong Kong can cultivate so many outstanding athletes who can compete and win against top Asian athletes on the international stage”.

What was missing, however, was an acknowledgement that only some members of the Hong Kong Sports Institute are delivering on that promise. Entering a competition and being good enough to be there are not the same thing.

Among this year’s Mongolian delegation was 42-year-old golfer Anarbat Jargalsaikhan, his country’s men’s national amateur champion.

At the end of the first round on Wednesday, Jargalsaikhan was dead last on 26-over-par, some 31 shots behind early leader Wong Wai-hsuan of Chinese Taipei. The pair may have occupied the same Kasugai Country Club East Course, but they were not playing the same game.

In Hong Kong the disparity is reflected in results. Rugby and fencing occupy one end of the spectrum as the gold standard by which the rest should be judged, at the other end sit the likes of athletics.

And even fencing will be asking questions of itself, given it returned fewer medals this time and has been unable to settle on adequate replacements for Olympic gold medallists Cheung Ka-long and Vivian Kong Man-wai.

Still, when meeting the press on Sunday in Nagoya to discuss his views on the past fortnight, Wong, who is also the honorary deputy secretary general of the Sports Federation and Olympic Committee, repeated a common talking point from officials involved in the city’s sporting success.

“Before we left Hong Kong for these Games, we said that while everyone in competitive sports focuses on the medal count, medals are not the ultimate goal for a sports association or an athlete in any single event,” he said. “We will not use the medal count as a rigid KPI to demand anything from our athletes.”

In many ways that is a sensible approach. While Siobhan Haughey, who was again solely responsible for the gold medals swimming contributed to the cause, was ensuring her place as the city’s greatest ever athlete, the next generation were showing some signs of life.

Teenagers Yeung Hoi-ching and Gilaine Ma might not have won individual medals, but reaching finals gave hope for the next Games in Doha, by which time their more illustrious teammate will most definitely have retired.

And yet, elsewhere, there must now be balancing of the books. Secretary for Culture, Tourism and Sport Rosanna Law Shuk-pui said as much on Saturday after Coleman Wong Chak-lam’s men’s singles gold.

Tennis had previously been given special dispensation to retain its Tier A status because there existed evidence that the government’s “long-term investment” would ultimately pay off.

With no medals and no hope of winning one, athletics is among those sports in danger of losing funding, and special measures in its case might be the saving of the sport in the city, especially if it forces changes at the Hong Kong, China Association of Athletics Affiliates.

Lee’s social media post dealt heavily with the “billions of dollars invested annually” to train the city’s elite athletes, adding that he was pleased “to see that the government’s investment is beginning to bear fruit”.

Coleman Wong has certainly done that, although his road to the top involved leaving his hometown early and challenging himself outside the Hong Kong bubble.

“If you keep playing only inside Hong Kong or Asian competitions where you can’t play against these world-class players, it’s actually very difficult,” he said. “It’s like a swimming pool – if you stay in Hong Kong and don’t venture out into the sea to swim, it’s impossible to compete, because the gap in strength is too big.”

The philosophy is the same with the men’s sevens team, who Wong Po-kee called “a source of pride” after Saturday’s triumph.

Captain James Christie said despite his side’s overwhelming dominance of their competition, it was “harder to stay at the top” than to get there in the first place.

“The teams are always gunning out for you, so it’s huge [to win],” he said. “We’ve been preparing for this since the last one, three years ago. Onto the next, onto the fourth one [in Doha in 2030 or 2031].”