BEIJING'S WINNING bid for the 2008 Olympics has generated a storm of enthusiasm in Macau, but it has also evoked bitter emotions over the enclave's continued exclusion from the Games. Many residents regard the exclusion as an injustice of Olympic proportions.
'There is new hope now,' Manuel Silverio, the president of the Macau Sports Development Board and the vice-president of the Macau Olympic Committee, said this week after Jacques Rogge was elected president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Mr Silverio attended the IOC meeting in Moscow as an adviser to Beijing's Olympic Games Bid Committee.
'It is unfair, and it makes no sense at all,' Joaquim Morais Alves, a former president of the Macau Olympic Committee, said about the IOC's 14-year-long rejection of Macau's bid for membership.
Macau applied for IOC membership in 1987, shortly after the Macau Olympic Committee was set up. The application process has been bogged down for obscure reasons, some of which appear intrinsically political.
Most in Macau blame former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch for the predicament. Mr Samaranch, a Spanish national, is believed to have put Macau's application on hold because he was worried that two trouble spots in his home country, the autonomous region of Catalonia and the British dependency of Gibraltar, could follow Macau's lead and insist on IOC membership too.
Although the IOC had traditionally accepted 'geographical areas' other than independent nations as members - such as Hong Kong, which joined in 1951 - it suddenly changed tack in 1996, when it decided only sovereign countries could be recognised as new members.