The 2013 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games is far away to talk about but this is not to be ignored as the host country Myanmar was rumored to proposed 28 sports for the biennial meet. The proposed sports are athletics, aquatics, archery, badminton, basketball, billiard and snooker, boxing, canoeing, cycling, football, golf, hockey, judo, karate, rowing, yachting, sepak takraw, shooting, table tennis, taekwondo, volleyball, weightlifting, wushu, tennis, chess, bodybuilding, petanque and traditional boat race. A possible demonstration sport would be Chinlon, a traditional and national sport of Myanmar. These proposed sports are sports which Myanmar can better achieve more golds.
Effect #1: Medal tally ranking of countries will definitely change compare to 2011 SEA Games in Indonesia. Thailand may not be affected by this proposed sports and 90% guaranteed to snatch the over-all championships. Vietnam on the other hand may lose about 40 gold medals according to Vietnamese sport experts. Indonesia and Malaysia will fight for the third spot. Possible rank 5 finish for Myanmar surpassing Singapore (possible 6th) and Philippines (possible 7th) in the medal tally. Remember 2009 Vientiane SEA Games, Laos almost got the 6th place from Singapore with the same number of golds but has 5 silvers deficit that made them 7th in ranking.
Effect #2: Bringing "Bodybuilding" in SEA Games may cause controversies as this sport is like a beauty pageant as it may look like. Scoring may cause disputes. It will always favor the host country like what happened in 2011 SEA Games when they added Roller sport. Indonesia got all the gold medals. It was not based on scoring but it was the sport that Indonesian knows that no other countries can snatch a single gold from them.
Effect #3: Brunei, Cambodia and Timor Leste will have a difficult SEA Games edition in getting a gold medal because of scrapping traditional SEA Games sports like "Shinjo Kempo" and "Pencak Silat" from which they can harvest gold.
Effect #4: In "Traditional Boat Race", Myanmar and Indonesia are the one to watch out if the Philippine Dragon Boat team will not be the one to represent in biennial. Philippines was not well represented in 2011 SEA Games despite of being known to have world class talents in this sport. If this is the case again, advance congratulations to Myanmar and Indonesia. It is possible to add more events in this sports.
With new adapted government, Myanmar will bring the best in the upcoming 2013 SEA Games. These are just some early insights for the early proposed sports but before the 2013 SEA Games kick-off, there are more big events to cover like the 2012 London Olympics, 3rd Asian Beach Games in China, 2013 Asian Indoor & Martials Arts Games in korea and the 2nd Asian Youth Games in China.
