> Players to watch out for at Doha Asia Games

As the Asian Games unfolds on 1st of December, here is a curtain raiser call on players to watch out for who can be superstars of this edition of games.

there are many a sportspersons who have left their impressions unforgettable during the past, this year is going to be no different.

Here with we at FunEnclave present a biography / Profile of the notable players participating at the Doha Asian Games, 2006.



Like father, like son


Profile: Koji Murofushi (Japan)
Athletics (hammer)



Following in the footsteps of a father who achieved legendary status in the same sport cannot be easy for any athlete, with people all too quick to draw comparisons between the two.

When that father won an incredible five hammer gold medals in a row at the Asian Games between 1970 and 1986, the weight of expectation would seemingly be even greater to continue this sporting dynasty.

However in the case of Japanese hammer thrower Koji Murofushi this does not appear to have been a problem – with the 32 year-old now a famous name in his own right and not just as the son of the legendary Shigenobu Murofushi.

Even so it would be amiss not to mention the comparisons given that both won their first Asian Games titles in the Thai capital Bangkok; Shigenobu in 1970 – improving on his silver medal in 1966 – and Koji 28 years later.

Delve a little deeper and you discover that while Murofushi senior was the first Asian man to throw the hammer over 70m, his son would go on to become the first Asian to launch it beyond the 80m mark in 2000.

Koji is now approaching 85m, having set the Asian record at 84.86m back in June 2003 in the Czech Republic to claim 5th place on the men’s hammer throw all-time list. He also holds the Asian Games record with a conservative 78.72m.
Birthday present

That best will surely be bettered next month in Doha when Koji will be the red-hot favourite to win his third consecutive Asian Games gold, having successfully defended his title in Busan, South Korea, four years ago.

Coming as it did with a new Games record throw of 78.72 – 15cm further than his benchmark set in 1998, this victory was all the more special for Koji as it gave him the perfect present on what was his 28th birthday.

Afterwards Koji was inevitably asked about his chances of emulating Shigenobu’s five gold medals, but said: “My father was so great that he competed until he was 41 years old. I can’t imagine that I will do better than him.”

Perhaps not do better, but equalling the haul is not beyond Koji if he were to compete beyond his 40th birthday into the 17th Asian Games. Indeed had it not been for Bi Zhong of China at the Games in Hiroshima in 1994, Koji would already have three gold medals.

That would have been a remarkable victory given that Koji only made his international debut for Japan at the 1992 World Junior Championships, having taken up the sport in his mid teens and been coached by his father.

Koji went on to attend Chukyo University’s School of Physical Education, but his father inevitably remained the main influence with the advice that only by studying the science of strength and technique would he improve.

Doha 2006 - Like father, like son

^ I should follow other sports - never heard of him before Lets see if he really makes it.

Any other sportsmen doc to watch out for - my knowledge in this is nothing to write home about I have to learn from you

Ohata: Asia’s rugby superstar

Daisuke Ohata may not play for one of the superpowers of world rugby, but the Japanese winger’s name is now written into the sport’s history books after he broke the try-scoring record of Australian legend David Campese in May.

That Ohata would break the record was never in doubt – it was a question of when the prolific wing would surpass Campese’s benchmark of 64 tries in 101 Tests, which had stood for more than a decade and remains an Australian record.

Ohata had, after all, scored 62 tries in 54 Test matches since making his debut for Japan against Korea back in November 1996 – an occasion he will never forget having marked it with a hat-trick of tries at the 15th Asian Championship.

For the record though, Campese’s mark was surpassed on 14 May 2006 with another hat-trick, this one against Georgia at the Hanazono Stadium in Osaka which, fittingly, had been the city where Ohata was born a little under 31 years earlier.

However it so nearly did not happen as it was only deep into injury time that Ohata scored his record-breaking 65th Test try, a burst of his natural speed being enough to exploit a tiny gap in the Georgian defence.

The Kobe Kobelco Steelers wing’s achievement was marked by the Japanese Rugby Football Union, who presented him with YEN1million and a gold-striped version of their national jersey amid celebrations by his teammates.

Doha 2006 - Ohata: Asia’s rugby superstar

well, the field of sports is so much vast that we can not follow all of them but still i try to keep pace with these amazing persons.

as keeping all the athletes together will not justify the purpose i am keeping one athlete per post. so keep watching.

Jamal blossoms on the world stage

Profile: Maryam Yusuf Jamal (Bahrain)
Athletics (800m, 1500m, 5000m)


Born 16 September 1984 in the same Ethiopian village as her idol Haile Gebrselassie, Zenebech Tola Kotu, as she was then known, was a latecomer to the world of athletics and only started running aged 15 in a trial organised by her school. She competed though not in the middle distances she is now associated with, but the sprint disciplines and even the high jump.

It was only a year later that Tola graduated into middle distance running by joining the Muger Club in Addis-Ababa and then narrowly failed to make the Ethiopian junior team for the World Cross Country Championships in 2001. She finished 3rd in the 1500m at the national junior championships next year and was invited to compete in races in Switzerland.

Tola took up the offer and won many events in this mix of road races and half marathons, prompting her to decide to base herself in Lausanne and file for political asylum in May 2002. She joined the Stade Lausanne Athlétisme club, but was fast becoming disillusioned with the sport and convinced that her future lay away from the track.

Her partner Mnashu Taye persuaded her to persevere and she duly achieved the 1500m Olympic qualifying time in 2004, prompting her to try and run for Ethiopia in the Athens Olympics. This request was turned down, as would be her subsequent application for Swiss citizenship due to their strict length of residency requirement.

Tola was confined to racing within Switzerland, but she continued to train hard hoping to find a solution to the problem. One duly arrived in the form of the Kingdom of Bahrain, who offered her and her partner citizenship. In January 2005 Zenebech Tola Kotu became Maryam Yusuf Jamal, although she still lives and trains in Switzerland.


Jamal quickly made a name for herself on the international stage, particularly on the track, with 22 wins from 26 races in her first season. The 2005 World Championships were one to forget, however, after she was badly spiked and faded to 5th in the 1500m, but she bounced back well to win the 800m, 1500m and 5000m titles at the Pan Arab Games in Tunis.

She ended the year with a world best time of 3:56.79 for the 1500m in Rieti and after a slow start to 2006 due to illnesses, Jamal has enjoyed a successful track season with victories over the distance in the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Athletics Final in Stuttgart and the IAAF World Cup in Athens, the latter in a World Cup record of 4:00.84.

Jamal is now focused on the 15th Asian Games Doha 2006 and winning two gold medals for her adopted country, which few would bet against given her rapid rise over the last couple of years.

The joy of gymnastics

For children, movement is life. The raw, exhilarating, simple joy of movement challenges and trains the developing limbs. We stretch and test our sinews, tendons, muscles and bones using our bodies in any way we can. Movement teaches balance and rhythm and life.

A very special few find that the raw joy of movement, that desire to test and stretch the limits of the human body, remains with them all their lives. These few become gymnasts.

Movement is part of the very beginning of our lives, and in the same way the challenges of gymnastics have been with us for most of our history. Texts outlining exercises akin to gymnastics have been found in China and Egypt from thousands of years before the modern era. Europe’s earliest written history, by Herodotus, describes the Gymnopaedia in Sparta from 600BC; a gymnastic and martial festival. Archaeologists in India and China have found pictograms that date from even earlier dates.

While the ancient Olympics did not feature a gymnastic discipline on its own, the flexibility, resilience and strength demonstrated were key parts of the many running and throwing disciplines at the time, and they were a standard part of the education.

Today there are three gymnastic disciplines recognised by the 15th Asian Games Doha 2006, as in the modern Olympics: artistic, rhythmic and trampoline. They all require grace, strength, rhythm, courage, precision, and suppleness; all are an elevated expression of the human mind and body, of art in athleticism; but each discipline is particularly emblematic of specific human virtues.



Trampoline, for example, requires especially rhythm and suppleness; rhythmic gymnastics demands a grace and precision above all; artistic gymnastics is firstly a demonstration of courage and strength.

It takes enormous bravery to backflip along a 4-inch (10.2cm) beam raised 4ft (1.2m) above the ground, as women’s artistic gymnasts must do. It takes phenomenal strength to swing rapidly through a series of handstands and flips and keep the rings perfectly still, as men’s artistic gymnasts must do.

While artistic gymnastics is a display of awesome strength and control, rhythmic gymnastics is undoubtedly the most entrancing of the disciplines. The routines demand grace, suppleness, balance and the delicate articulation of every limb, joint and bone while the gymnast weaves ball, ribbon or rope.

Rich
All of these disciplines combined create a huge array of competitions and medals. There are six men’s disciplines and four women’s in artistic gymnastics. Rhythmic gymnastics, too, works with six apparatus, each requiring different rhythmic talents but all demanding the grace and suppleness of a ballerina.

Currently trampoline is only recognised as a stand-alone individual discipline by the Asian Games, as is the case in modern Olympics.

In all, it makes for 19 separate competitions and one of the richest gold seams in the Games. In gymnastics, there’s a lot to play for.

And with China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and many other Asian countries and regions among some of the top performers in these events, Doha 2006 is set to offer a very exciting round-up of top quality gymnastics action.

China is expected to scoop the majority of the honours. Its men’s and women’s artistic teams took the all-round artistic award and Yang Wei secured the men’s individual all-round gold at the World Championships in Aarhus, Denmark in October. Cheng Fei, on the women’s side, was instrumental in the team victory, winning gold in both vault and floor to bring her total medal tally to three.

Now, China’s coach is worried the team will become complacent. "It's very dangerous for our gymnasts to regard themselves as indisputable number one in the Asiad gymnastics competition," Zhang Peiwen told the Xinhua news agency.

China will certainly not be unchallenged in December. Japan’s men’s artistic team will provide stiff resistance, particularly Hiroyuki Tomita, Japan’s greatest artistic gymnast, who lost his gold medal to Yang. Korea will also be eager to overcome the disappointment felt at the World Championships. It failed, against all expectations, to qualify for the final.

Doha will witness world class rivalry in rhythmic gymnastics, too. In the 2005 World Rhythmic Gymnastics Championships, Kazakhstan’s Aliya Yussupova, Japan’s Yukari Murata and China’s Yiming Xiao were the highest-placed Asian competitors in the individual all-round events, although Japan and China led Kazakhstan in the overall rankings. There is no team event in rhythmic gymnastics, but countries do count their cumulative winnings.



Lion’s share
So China looks set to take the lion’s share of laurels, but it’s far from certain because a scoring system introduced by governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG), could produce a few surprises as athletes test and experiment with the new rules.

Gone is the system where judges assumed a perfect 10 and then deducted points for errors. Now they will use a cumulative system that has no maximum score, with points awarded for difficulty and execution and deducted for errors.

FIG introduced the system following a protest by fans over the scoring of the men’s parallel bars event in Athens 2004. At that event, Russia’s Alexei Nimov thrilled and delighted fans with a spectacular display. But their delight quickly turned to anger when Nimov received just 9.725 for his routine.

After 10 minutes of booing, the shocked and bewildered judges increased the marks to 9.762. Fans, amazed by the ambition of his performance, did not realize his minor errors of execution. FIG developed the new system to make scoring more transparent.

And while it will make scoring clearer, it definitely obscures the medal outcome. The system rewards daring techniques, and at the recent World Championships some competitors complained that it was pushing athletes into risky manoeuvres. Certainly the men put on some spectacular displays at that competition.

But women tended to focus more on perfection of execution and they scored at least as highly as their male colleagues, proving that excellence of execution is still equally valued as the ambition of the routine.

These rules were first used at the World Championships in October, but Doha 2006 is just the second time the rules were used in real competition. It could still produce surprises as the new regulations bed down.

All eyes on Ding once again

Confidence has never been a problem for China’s Ding Junhui, who enters the 15th Asian Games Doha 2006 as overwhelming favourite to retain the gold medal he won as a 15 year-old in South Korea four years ago.

Ding, who as a teenage spectator once challenged a professional player for a game during the interval of a tournament in Guangzhou, South China, carries the hopes of a nation on his shoulders in Doha in December.

The heavy burden of expectation should not be a problem however as Ding has never been out of the limelight since easily beating Thai ace Supoj Saenla, a player seven years his senior, 3-1 in the 14th Asian Games Busan 2002 final.

As Cui Zhiqiang, the team manager at the time, said: “There had been great pressure on the boy because he wanted to play well for his country but he brought out his full potential when it mattered.”

Since then Ding has gone on to fulfil his potential on the world stage, enjoying a meteoric rise to the top by mixing sublime skill with an icy temperament that belies his years.

Ding made a big impression on his professional debut in 2004 when he was given a wildcard to the Masters at Wembley, United Kingdom.

A surprise victory over Joe Perry, one of the world’s top 16, marked him out as a potential star of the game with many commentators believing he was a world champion in the making.

A great talent

It did not take Ding long to claim his first professional title and there was no better place for him to do it than on his 18th birthday at the Haidian Stadium in Beijing at the China Open, against one of the sport’s legends.

Seven-time world champion Stephen Hendry was beaten 9-5 in a final watched by a television audience of around 100million, signalling Ding’s arrival in the big time.

"I didn't feel any pressure because I just looked at it as a practice match to learn from Stephen,” Ding revealed coolly.

Hendry in turn was full of admiration, saying: “Ding's a great talent. There's no doubt about that and what he did in front of his home crowd was a real achievement.”

The fear was whether Ding could produce the same standard of play outside of Asia, but those questions were quickly quashed in December last year when the Chinese became the first non-British or Irish winner of the UK Championship, the second biggest event in snooker.

Ding cruised through the early rounds in York, England, and then beat Neil Robertson and Perry in the quarterfinal and semifinal. “Ding's white-ball control was absolutely fantastic,” admitted the vanquished Robertson. “I don't know if anyone else is quite so good at that, apart from Ronnie O’Sullivan.”

A 10-6 victory over six-time world champion Steve Davis in the final followed, a victory as resounding as the scoreline suggests, with Ding more than matching the old master for tactical and positional play. "There are loads of people who can pot balls but his level of maturity marks him out as something special," said Davis.

Favourite for gold

Ding then claimed his third ranking title at the Northern Ireland Trophy in August this year, beating O’Sullivan 9-6 in the final. The success made him only the third player after O’Sullivan and John Higgins to win three top titles before turning 20.

The feat caps a remarkable ascent that began when Ding picked up a cue for the first time because of boredom at the age of nine and joined his father for a game. A year later he had become unbeatable in his hometown of Yixing, Jiangsu, near Shanghai, and soon he was attracting attention from the Chinese Billiards Association.

By the age of 11 Ding was practicing eight hours a day and it is this dedication that he hopes can inspire other promising players from Asia, such as compatriots Liang Wenbo and Liu Song and Thailand’s Issara Kachaiwong, all of whom will be competing in Doha.

"When I was young I moved away from home to South China and I was taught by experienced players,” he said. "Players such as Liang and Liu are at a similar level and they will learn much from playing in the UK, as I have done.”

Maybe so in the future, but they will have to make great strides if they are to prevent Ding from standing on top of the medal rostrum in Doha.