Four days after Lee Lai-shan's Olympics gold, the race to see who can come up with the tackiest attempt to cash in on her victory is still going strong. Businesses in the territory are flooding her family with unsolicited offers of inappropriate gifts. Latest to try to curry favour are Koh-I-Noor Indian restaurants, who are offering her free meals for a year. They also want to help out with the 70-table banquet on Cheung Chau to mark her return next week. Quite how island residents would react to celebrating the occasion with curries rather than choi sum remains to be seen. Still, at least it would spice up the lifetime's supply of free Thai rice offered by Kam Yuen wholesalers. Another offer came from Top Glory Insurance, which wants to provide San San with a tailor-made life, medical and accident policies. The company thoughtfully adds that it hopes this will put her 'mind at peace' during forthcoming practices and contests. In other words: if she breaks a leg, at least it'll get some free publicity. But the prize for the tackiest effort to exploit her victory belongs to Fu Shan property agency, which plastered Wong Tai Sin with posters proclaiming 'monopolisation of gold medals by foreign powers is not allowed'. Using a Chinese term usually reserved for describing the foreign invasions of the mainland during the treaty port era, they conjured up images of her medal being China's revenge for the Opium Wars. Memo to Fu Shan: there's a job at Xinhua waiting for you. Xinhua (the New China News Agency) could certainly do with some assistance. Its local office had some difficulty dealing with the fact Hong Kong had scored its first gold while still under colonial rule, rather than waiting another four years to allow Beijing to share the glory. Deputy director Zhang Junsheng bravely insisted it was a great gift to mark Hong Kong's return to the motherland. Ta Kung Pao went one step further and turned San San's prediction that hers would be only the first of many medals for Hong Kong athletes, into a patriotic desire for more victories under Chinese rule. But the real problem for the Xinhua was that director Zhou Nan's telegram congratulating San San evidently aroused suspicion among fellow cadres that their hardline colleague had finally gone native: and was showing more concern for the success of Hong Kong athletes than their mainland compatriots. That seems to explain a dispatch, rushed out 24 hours after San San's victory, in which the Hong Kong branch of Xinhua lavished congratulations on China's earlier medal-winners. At least Mr Zhou managed to get in first with his congratulations. Acting governor Donald Tsang Yam-kuen had hoped to steal that title. But From The Corridors can reveal he was badly let down by team manager and former Independent Commission Against Corruption chairman Bertrand de Speville, who had been primed to ensure Mr Tsang got in first. When it came to the moment of victory, Mr de Speville was so busy embracing San San that Mr Tsang, awakened from his slumber by an alert press secretary, was unable to get through. With a backlog of calls building up (Chief Secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang was reported to be also trying to get through from London), he had no choice but to call on the media for help. TVB agreed to put him through: but only in return for an exclusive interview. Still it was a small price to pay for the normally loquacious Mr Tsang, who was heard to exclaim he was so excited he didn't know what to say.
