China Wins 1st London Olympics Gold Medal

LONDON – The first athlete to qualify for the London Olympics also won the first gold medal Saturday.

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By Christopher Hanewinckel, USA TODAY Sports

Top-ranked Yi Siling of China captures the first gold medal of the London Games with a victory in the women's 10-meter air rifle competition at Royal Artillery Barracks.

Yi Siling of China, who earned a shooting quota spot when she won the world women's 10-meter air rifle championship in Munich two years ago, capped her domination of the discipline since then with the Olympic title.

"I feel like I had a lot of luck," Yi said, even though the results said otherwise.

Polish soldier Sylwia Bogacka topped qualifying and had gold in her grasp until the third-to-last shot. She recovered to claim silver for her first major medal.

Yu Dan of China earned the bronze. China became the first team since 1988 to have two medalists in the event.

Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi of Malaysia, competing while eight months pregnant, was 34th in the field of 56. She was relieved not to go into labor during the 75-minute qualifying.

"She kicked only three or four times," she said of her baby. "I told her to behave herself, and she always listens to me."

Yi, renowned for her ability to stay unruffled, cried with relief in her coach's arms after the final and welcomed the crush of Chinese media, saying their enthusiasm for her made her feel like a movie star.

Movies may not be far off for the woman known in her homeland as the Shooting Beauty.

But all she and Yu could think of afterward, aside from celebrating with teammates, were their families. Yi said her father has been suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure for a year.

Yu became emotional in thanking her family, especially her father, for their support. She stood at the news conference and bowed to the TV cameras and wiped tears.

"They never let me worry," Yu said.

Yi has made it to 12 finals in 15 competitions over the past four years, and medaled nine times. She's the world and Asian champion. Yet she admitted to nerves throughout the event at the Royal Artillery Barracks.

She couldn't catch Bogacka until the Pole flubbed her eighth shot in the 10-shot final. Bogacka scored 9.7, her worst of the final, and dropped to third, but a near-perfect score, 10.8 of 10.9, on her final shot gave her silver ahead of Yu.

"It happens sometimes," Bogacka said of the 9.7. "I didn't prepare well for the shot, but I knew what I did wrong and fixed it for the last shot. I saw in my mind the last shot, 10.8, and when I saw it on the monitor I was very happy."

She's the first Polish shooting medalist since 2000.

Defending champion Katerina Emmons of the Czech Republic, who scraped into the final from a qualifying shootoff, finished fourth. Beijing silver medalist Lioubov Galkina of Russia was 10th.

2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Olympics and business

Olympics and business

The economic benefits of hosting the Olympic Games have been rather dubious at best

IF you were a hard-core sports fan, you would have woken up at 4am to watch the opening ceremony for the London Olympics this morning. In which case you probably won’t read this until afternoon as you regain some sleep.

Yes, the long-awaited games are upon us and we wait again to see if someone will bring a gold medal home finally. I think our only chance is Lee Chong Wei in badminton who lost the last Olympics final to Lin Dan of China in 2008 and returned with a silver.

What continues to boggle the mind is the cost of the games and how it keeps on going up and up. For Britain, the injection of money into the economy as well as a slew of business opportunities the games must have thrown up must offer some welcome respite from the bad times and even a chance to stem the downturn in the economy.

As former British Prime Tony Blair put it at an event publicising the Olympics: “If you were to pose the question to (fellow bidders) Paris or Madrid or New York ... ‘Would you prefer to be putting on the Olympics right now?’ I’m sure they would say ‘Yes’.”

Well that’s his take on it. The cost of hosting the games is £9.3bil or a massive RM46.5bil. But what is telling is that the original estimated cost was just £2.4bil (RM12bil).

Blair helped to deliver the Olympics to London for 2012 in 2005 over other competitors which included Paris and New York, with Paris being the hot favourite. Given the traditional rivalry between the French and the British, the unexpected victory must have been sweet.

But not so the near quadrupling of the costs in hosting the Olympic games. This has been heavily criticised with people questioning loudly whether London would benefit from hosting the games with costs having increased so much.

Besides, London through its mayor Ken Livingstone, signed off considerable rights to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which requires cities bidding for the games to sign the contract ahead of the awarding of the games to a particular city.

A lengthy article in Vanity Fair gives a glimpse of such requirements revealed by activist groups. Below is an extract:

“To comply with its terms, London must designate 250 miles of dedicated traffic lanes for the exclusive use of athletes and ‘the Olympic Family,’ including IOC members, honorary members, and ‘such other persons as may be designated by the IOC.’ (These traffic lanes are sometimes called ‘Zil lanes,’ alluding to the Soviet-era express lanes in Moscow reserved for the politburo’s favourite limousines.)

“Members of the Olympic Family must also have at their disposal at least 500 air-conditioned limousines with chauffeurs wearing uniforms and caps. London must set aside and pay for 40,000 hotel rooms, including 1,800 four- and five-star rooms for the IOC and its associates, for the entire period of the games. London must cede to the IOC the rights to all intellectual property relating to the games, including the international trademark on the phrase ‘London 2012.’ Although mail service and the issuance of currency are among any nation’s sovereign rights, the contract requires the British government to obtain the IOC’s ‘prior written approval’ for virtually any symbolic commemoration of the games, including Olympic-themed postage stamps, coins, and banknotes.”

One would be forgiven for thinking that London has surrendered its sovereign rights to the IOC for the period of the games!

Back to business. Lloyds Banking Group chief economist Patrick Foley meantime estimates that the Olympic Games will give a boost of £16.5bil (RM82.5bil), mostly through construction, to the UK economy although how he arrives at that is not clear.

That’s not a lot simply because the direct spend on the Olympics is already £9.3bil and unless such spending has the recurrent ability to reproduce income over many years, it is not justifiable.

Foley points that the bigger impact will be the regeneration of a neglected area of East London which became the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. However, it is naïve to think that the area would continue to be as lively after the Olympics and there would be the question of what to do with all that excessive infrastructure post the games.

At best, the benefits of the Olympics for the host city is dubious. At worst, one can argue quite cogently that all that money could have been put for better use in infrastructure and regeneration that would have been more sustainable than for providing facilities for a large and temporary influx of athletes, even if they were world-class, and others.

Meantime, Britain is making the best out of the Olympics. Prime Minister David Cameron just two days before the opening ceremony for the Olympics launched a high-powered attempt to woo global business at a conference to showcase Britain to the world.

Among those for whom the red carpet will be rolled out is a 30-strong delegation from China. Britain is wooing foreign investors in a real big way and using the Olympics to the hilt to do that.

And read what Cameron’s predecessor Blair said to Vanity Fair earlier: “If you said to David Cameron, or anyone involved with this, ‘If you could click your fingers, and the Olympics would be held in Paris instead of London, what would you feel: (a) relieved, or (b) Oh, my God, what did we give that up for?’ it would be b. What you make of the Olympics is in a way up to you. For a country like Britain, it’s a great thing for us to have the Olympics here. We can afford to do the Olympics. We’re Britain. We’re not some Third World country.”

Really? That’s almost a desperate attempt to try and get foreign investments in to help soothe the troubled waters that is the British economy smacks of what many Third World countries would have done to boost their own economies.

A Question of Business by P.GUNASEGARAM

 l Independent consultant and writer P Gunasegaram (t.tp.guna@gmail.com) does not love the Olympics so much as to stay awake until 4am to watch the opening ceremony.

National Instruments to set up its largest R&D facility outside US in Penang

KUALA LUMPUR: US-based National Instruments (NI) is aiming to set up its largest research and development (R&D) facility outside the United States with the expansion of its facilities in Penang.

“Currently we are operating in a rented space. With this expansion, we will have our own infrastructure to support our business in the region,” NI Penang managing director Raj Purushothaman told a press briefing on the expansion plans of the company yesterday.

The company also aims to increase its manufacturing capacity to support an additional US$1bil in the company's growth.

Raj: ‘With this expansion, we will have our own infrastructure to support our business in the region.”

The capacity would add another 40% to its global hardware manufacturing capacity which would include the manufacturing of academic products, embedded controllers, industrial chassis and modular instruments.

Its manufacturing arm is slated to be operational in the fourth quarter.

In tandem with the planned five to 10-year expansion, the company is aiming to expand its local headcount to 1,000-1,500 employees from its current 165.

This includes 250 engineers in electrical, mechanical and engineering management fields.

The technology hardware and software provider began operations in Malaysia in 2009 with an US$80mil capital investment.

Raj said as part of the planned investment, the expansion was envisioned to transform its facilities in Penang to be the Asia-Pacific hub, serving its clients in the region and elsewhere.

“It will be an integrated operations centre, which manages R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, product distribution, product services, IT and finance,” he said.

Its expansion includes the construction of a 314,000 sq ft office and manufacturing space on a 23-acre site in Batu Maung, Penang.

Its manufacturing arm slated to be operational in the fourth quarter would have the capacity to support an additional US$1bil in the company's growth.

NI is among other American multinationals that have established its presence in Malaysia such as Honeywell, Dell, Intel, General Electric, Western Digital and Motorola.

At the event, International Trade and Industry Minister Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed said the United States was the third largest foreign investor in the manufacturing sector in 2011 with RM2.5bil.

The investments were mainly in electrical and electronics, chemical and chemicals products, transport equipment and wood & wood products.

“The electrical and electronics (E&E) industry continues to be a major contributor to Malaysia's gross domestic product growth . For the period January to May 2012, E&E exports were 32.27% of the total country's exports and 48.73% of the manufactured exports,” he said in his speech delivered by Malaysian Investment Development Authority (Mida) chief executive officer Datuk Noharuddin Nordin.

- The Star

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