In the lead-up to the 2025 SEA Games, while most athletes were busy tapering their muscles and visualising the podium, the Malaysian athletics camp was busy staging a performance that would make a Korean soap opera blush. We had Danish Irfan Tamrin, an 18-year-old sprinter with actual talent, who was reportedly instructed by his coach to fake a back injury just to withdraw from the 4x100m relay. Why? To make room for a veteran athlete.

The WhatsApp instructions were Dickensian: line-by-line dictation on how to lie in a withdrawal letter. When you start teaching teenagers how to lie to medical doctors, you aren’t “optimising performance”. You are industrialising deceit. You are telling the next generation that honesty is a hurdle you should simply skip. 

But the “soap opera” was just the opening act. Once the Games actually began, the Pencak Silat arena became the stage for a “group tantrum” that shocked the region. After a controversial 60–60 tie-break loss to Thailand, our coaches didn’t shake hands and head for the showers. Instead, they decided to audition for a Sylvester Stallone movie by allegedly assaulting a Filipino referee and a Thai competition manager.

I’ve seen more sportsmanship in a pack of hyenas fighting over a wildebeest carcass. This wasn’t a professional protest; it was a physical manifestation of a national ego that has become so bloated it can no longer fit through the stadium gates. We’ve turned “fighting for the flag” into “punching the person who tells us we aren’t the best”. It’s thuggish, and it’s ultimately embarrassing.

Finally, we arrive at the Malaysia Ice Hockey Federation (MIHF). Malaysia didn’t just lose; they lost every single match they played. They finished the tournament with the same number of points as a dead hamster. And how did MIHF react? Did they apologise for the lack of preparation? Did they promise to build a rink that isn’t essentially a glorified slushy machine?

No. They went on Facebook—the natural habitat of the terminally confused—and suggested that Indonesia’s win was “unpatriotic” because they used naturalised players from Russia.

Let’s just pause there. This is like losing a drag race to a Ferrari and then claiming the result doesn’t count because the Ferrari was made in Italy. It’s not just a “sore loser” attitude; it’s a level of weapons-grade stupidity that should be studied by NASA. We are living in a world where our administrators believe that if you can’t win the game, you should simply try to delete the other team’s achievements with a passive-aggressive status update. 

Unsurprisingly, this administrative temper tantrum went down like a bucket of cold sick with the actual sporting community. Athletes, former pros, and fans alike didn’t just disagree; they revolted. To the players who have spent years training in shopping mall rinks, being told their loss was a matter of “patriotism” felt less like leadership and more like a targeted betrayal. The resulting digital firestorm from the fans exposed a deeper, more terminal crisis of legitimacy brewing within the federation. When the people you are supposed to represent start treating your official statements like the rambling incoherent thoughts of a person who’s had too much gin, you aren’t an administrator anymore—you’re a liability.

Why is this happening? Because Malaysian sports administrators are terrified. They are so desperate for a shiny bit of metal to justify their taxpayer-funded junkets that they’ve abandoned the very concept of integrity. This year, they even introduced a “colourless” medal target. A “colourless” target! That’s like a restaurant saying their goal is to serve “some amount of food.” It’s a linguistic shield designed to hide failure behind a fog of arithmetic.

Losing is a vital part of the human experience. It tells you that you aren’t good enough yet. It’s the universe’s way of saying, “Back to the gym, sunshine.” But our administrators can’t handle that. They’ve spent so long sniffing their own press releases that they think they have a divine right to the podium. And when they don’t get it, they lash out, they lie, and they embarrass 34 million Malaysians who actually know how to behave in public.

We can survive a 0-gold performance. We’ve done it before, and let’s face it, we’ll probably do it again. What we cannot survive is a leadership that has the moral backbone of a chocolate éclair.

If you want to be a sports administrator, you need to learn the two most important words in the language of sports: Well played. Not “The referee was biased,” not “Their players are too Russian,” and certainly not “I’ll see you in the parking lot.”

Until then, I suggest we stop sending administrators to the SEA Games altogether. Just send the athletes. They might still lose, but at least they won’t make us look like the regional equivalent of a toddler who’s been told he can’t have a McFlurry.