Cuban press attacks “purchase of sportsmen"--mad about Table Tennis athletes (look out baseball)
Havana/dpa. - The specialized Cuban press yesterday attacked the purchase and nationalization of foreign athletes, an “alarming practice” in world-wide sport that, it says, threatens extending in Latin America. “The purchase and nationalization (of sportsmen) are only one analgesic bandage for the deep sport wound of these countries”, commented Noticiero Nacional Deportivo (NND).
In an ample report it questioned “if the solution to be the vanguard in the sport is really that formula or if it turns to countries that practice it in real sport powers”.
The “Chinese” of RD These specialized sport spaces agree in which “the appearance of the Chinese Liu representing Song of Argentina in Table Tennis of the Pan-American Games of Winnipeg (Canada, 1999), was the first warning of the expansion of this phenomenon in countries of Latin America”.
“The competitions of table tennis in the Pan-American Games of Santo Domingo 2003 presented/displayed, like by art of magic, Latin names such `' as Snows Xue Wu, Roll Quian and Luis Lin Ju, in the representation of the host country”, says on the other hand “Workers”.
It emphasizes in addition that the Chinese also dominated that discipline in the Central American Games and of the Caribbean of 2006, celebrated in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.
Other publications recently emphasize that “Asian nations as Chile and Costa Rica influenced by the Dominican case and the North American precedents (of the United States and Canada), are lawyer openly by the pimponistas nationalization of `' (players of table tennis) and arqueros not to remain behind the tendency of world-wide sport.”
Article from Listin Diario, 1/23/07, Dominican newspaper, translation from Spanish by google. Following is original article in Spanish: Prensa cubana ataca “compra de deportistas”