Then & Now | When did Hong Kong first compete in the Olympics? We look back as the Paris 2024 Games end

Hong Kong’s Olympic legacy has been coloured by diplomacy, a spying ‘Chinese mermaid’ and the ever tenacious ‘Sonny’ Sales

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Mr Arnaldo de Oliveira Sales, former Chairman of the Urban Council, addresses the opening ceremony of the Wan Chai Sports Ground in February 1979. Photo: SCMP

Jason Wordie

Published: 5:20pm, 7 Aug 2024

The Paris Olympics are nearing their grand finale; that’s it for another four years. With the French capital having hosted the 1924 Games, the event’s return to France a century later makes an attractive symmetry.

While athletes from Hong Kong have taken part in the Olympics since the interwar years, until 1948 they took part as Chinese national competitors under the Republic of China banner – not as a distinct regional entity. Teams and individuals from the People’s Republic of China, which came into existence in 1949, were recognised as PRC representative teams only after widespread diplomatic derecognition of the Nationalist government through the 1970s.

Teams and individuals from Taiwan – where the Nationalist government had retreated in 1949 – continued to compete internationally under “Chinese Taipei”, a compromise and essentially a tacit acknowledgement of the one-China policy. While everyone knows where they are from – and who they really represent – this tactful designation ensures no wider political feathers are ruffled and broader national unity (however tentative) is presented to the wider world.

Swimmer Yvonne Yeung, also known as Yeung Sau-king, represented the Republic of China in 1936. Photo: Handout

Swimmer Yvonne Yeung, also known as Yeung Sau-king, represented the Republic of China in 1936. Born in Hong Kong in 1919, she trained from a young age through the South China Athletic Association, which, in the 1930s, had harbourfront swimming facilities at Tsat Tsz Mui, all long since lost to reclamation. Although Yeung had won numerous medals at earlier national and regional sporting events, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics she did not advance beyond preliminary heats. She retired from competitive swimming in the late 1930s, and married B.L. Tao, a well-known local jockey, in 1939.

Yeung retired from competitive swimming in the late 1930s, and married B.L. Tao, a well-known local jockey, in 1939; this newspaper clipping shows their wedding announcement. Photo: Handout

Yeung worked clandestinely in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong for Nationalist intelligence in 1942-43, before moving to Shanghai, where she continued these activities until the end of the war. Known for the rest of her life as “China’s mermaid”, after her post-war divorce from Tao and remarriage to an Indonesian-Chinese businessman, Yeung lived in Thailand for several years, returned to Hong Kong in 1953, subsequently emigrated to Vancouver, Canada, in 1978, and died there in 1982, after falling from a ladder.

But when did athletes directly begin to represent Hong Kong in its own right? The Amateur Sports Federation and Olympic Committee was formed in 1950. Recognised by the International Olympic Committee the following year, Hong Kong subsequently competed independently of Britain at the Games. In these instances, the Hong Kong flag was flown and the British national anthem – then also the local national anthem – played.

A de O’Sales, former president of the Hong Kong Amateur Sports Federation and Olympic Committee, presents the SAR flag to Kenny Chow Kun-wah, deputy head of the Hong Kong delegation to Sicily, Italy, in preparation for the 1997 University Games. Photo: SCMP

Despite ever-closer mainland integration, Hong Kong continues to send a separate team to the Olympics who compete under the SAR flag. That this extraordinary degree of autonomy still happens is ultimately due to one person’s stubborn determination; long-serving Urban Council chairman A. de O. Sales (Arnaldo de Oliveira Sales), who chaired the local Olympic Committee for decades.