Tokyo Olympics: Hong Kong politics mostly cast aside but can medals truly help to unite a divided city?

The shirt-gate incident involving badminton player Angus Ng Ka-long showed that politics can invade the sporting world and cause rifts

Hongkongers largely came together to support the city’s athletes as they brought in a record haul of Olympic medals

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Angus Ng Ka-long wearing the now infamous black shirt missing the Bauhinia emblem. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 9:00am, 9 Aug 2021Updated: 6:01pm, 9 Aug 2021

When Hong Kong No 1 badminton player Angus Ng Ka-long chose to wear his own black jersey at the Tokyo Olympics, he did not expect to be pulled into a political controversy during one of the most important competitions of his life.

Nicholas Muk Ka-chun, a member of the Beijing-loyal Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) party, took him to task for wearing not only a T-shirt without the city’s Bauhinia emblem, but also one in black, the symbolic colour of anti-government demonstrations of 2019.

For those brief few days, it seemed as if even the Olympics could not stay clear of the city’s divided politics, of blue and yellow camps, or pro- and anti-government sectors.

Ng had to explain his sponsorship had ended and he had picked a comfortable shirt, printed with his name and “Hong Kong, China” to satisfy the requirements of the Olympic organisers. A law prevented him from putting the emblem on the shirt by himself, he explained, adding: “I love the Bauhinia flower from the bottom of my heart.”

When the eighth seed made an early exit at the group stage following the controversy, Ng’s supporters blamed Muk, who apologised. Shirt-gate opened up the wounds of a city yet to heal from the political divisions wrought by the 2014 Occupy protests calling for more democracy and the 2019 anti-government demonstrations.