Barack Hussein Obama beats John McCain in race to win US presidency (a different kind of sport)

By Les Tan

This site is about sports. Always will be. Yet there is a life outside of the court and the field that we all play in as well. In the game of life, the rules are sometimes not so clear and the goal posts can sometimes even shift. You see and feel it at school and at work.

Outside of sport, one of the biggest races you’ll ever see is an election, and no election comes bigger than the race to become the president of the United States of America. Especially the election of 2008.

When Barack Hussein Obama beat John McCain by gaining the minimum 270 electoral college votes to secure the presidency, it was a win of breathtaking historical significance.

It is a significant because for the first time in the 231-year history of the United States of America, an African-American man has been elected to the highest political office. Just 53 years ago, African-Americans could not even vote.

Significantly too, Obama was able to galvanise the younger people, with 66% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 voting for him.

He told a story and shared a vision that the younger people heard in their hearts and their heads. Obama connected with them, with US college newspapers endorsing him at a ratio of 63 to 1. Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer, born to a Kenyan father and a white Kansas woman, spent some years in Jakarta and then moved to Hawaii where he was raised by his white grandparents.

His improbable victory unleashes hope that no matter your race, your background, your disadvantages, you can, with effort, discipline and teamwork, win. He won not because he was black, but in spite of it. He won because folks saw that he was intelligent enough, calm enough and serious enough, to lead. That he happened to be black was incidental, and not even considered by some.

Our nation of Singapore is not homogeneous. We are aware of our racial divisions and fault lines. That is why, for a whole generation of Singaporeans, the football team of the 70s was a rainbow team our country embraced. Why? Because the Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians were woven together to play a game that inspired and thrilled everyone. They were truly a national team.

Today, some of our national teams don’t reflect the population, much to our collective loss. Our best born-and-bred don’t play for the country. This has its roots in our system of education and sport, where the best drop out due to studies and national service.

Racial lines also get unnecessarily drawn from a young age. Let not our school and national age-group teams have invisible barriers of race, where talent cannot play because the same language is not spoken.

Let our best children play together, let the talents rise regardless of race, and one day, may all our national teams show the best of us: Chinese, Indians, Malays, Eurasians, born and bred in Singapore.

Then perhaps we’ll have a true national team that the country can embrace again.