Column | Does Hong Kong Marathon’s surge in popularity since 1997 reflect city’s changing attitude to sport?
Barely 1,000 runners turned up for first race – now it could easily accomodate 100 times that number says Standard Chartered chief Benjamin Hung
Benjamin Hung Pi-cheng was ahead of his time in many ways when he proposed to Ian Wilson, then chief of Standard Chartered, and Mervyn Davies, then corporate banking head and now a member of Britain’s House of Lords, that they should start a marathon in Hong Kong.
That was 1996 and to hear Hung recount the tale in the same office on the 32nd floor of the bank’s HQ in Central, sport was something of a mystery to the people of Hong Kong “with the exception of horse racing and mahjong”.
A lot has changed since those pre-handover days of course. Many would argue not always for the better, but one thing that has surely improved is the city’s sporting culture.
Even if Hung, now the bank’s regional CEO for Asia, might have been overstating the case somewhat when he suggests that the general populace was then interested almost exclusively in making money, the evidence of the marathon’s popularity alone suggests that residents are far more aware of the benefits of sport and an active lifetyle.
From what Hung describes as “a piddly 1,000” entries in its first year, some 74,000 are set to take part on Sunday, with demand for at least 100,000 places.