China in the Olympics

People are curious to know when China first took part in the Olympics.

Some say it was at the very first Olympic Games in 1896, or during the latter part of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), when the country was ruled by dowager Cixi (1835-1906).



Upon receiving an invitation from the International Olympic Committee, nobody at her court knew what was meant by "Olympics." When she was eventually told that it was a sports meet including running events, she burst out laughing and said, "Well, we may send some of our eunuchs who are running the court so well. They are good runners."

Perhaps this might be a mere idle tale about the unpopular dowager. It remains a riddle whether the Qing court received a letter of invitation from the IOC at all.

In order to find an answer to this problem, Mr. Lu Enchun, a coach of the Chinese gymnastics team, once went to the Imperial Palace in Beijing to look into the Qing archives. But he was completely at sea among the piles of documents.

Similar effort was made by some China Olympic Committee officials from a different angle in 1995 when they visited the international Olympic Museum in Lausanne. The only answer they got from the keeper was that not every country was invited to the first Olympics.

According to a relevant document available, it's more probable than not that China was NOT invited to the first Olympic Games. That's a book entitled "Li Hongzhang's Missions to Europe and America." Li was Prime Minister of the Qing government and paid a visit to Europe in 1896. He was informed by the French Foreign Minister that the first Olympics were to be held in Europe, and it was hoped that Li would be able to come to France again. But nothing was mentioned about China being invited to the Olympic Games.



So when was China invited for the first time to the Olympics? According to historical records, Chinese diplomat Wang Zhengting was elected into the IOC in 1922. It was then that the sports organization in China was formally recognized by the IOC. And it is stipulated in the Olympic Charter that only an organization recognized by the IOC may enter competitors in the Olympic Games. It was not until 1932 when the 10th Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles that China was invited for the first time to send athletes for competition.

Four years before this, however, when the 9th Olympics were scheduled to be held in Amsterdam in 1928, China had been invited to send an observer to attend the opening ceremony through a diplomat named Song Ruhai. In addition, an overseas Chinese He Haohua registered in a cycling race on behalf of his motherland. Unfortunately, he was injured and hospitalized. Anyhow, he was the first Chinese Olympian.

In his Chinese History of Sports over the Past Century, Prof. Wu Wenzhong confirms that China was first represented by Song Ruhai at the Olympic Games in 1928- entirely in the capacity of an observer. About this Song has written in his book, " The World Games".

In spite of the presence of a Chinese official and a voluntary competitor at the 9th Olympics, no delegation worthy of the name had ever been sent by China to the Olympics until 1932. Even then, the Chinese government had no real intention to take part in the 10th Olympic Games. It happened that the Japanese invaders had occupied northeastern China and concocted the bogus Manchukuo. A plot was afoot to send a promising athlete, Liu Changchun, to the 1932 Olympics in the name of the puppet regime in order to make it accepted as a fait accompli. But the patriotic-minded athlete made a statement in the newspaper "L' Impartial", refusing to represent the so-called Manchuguo at the Olympics.



Meanwhile, the well-known patriotic General Zhang Xueliang exposed the Japanese aggressors' scheme and declared that he would sponsor Liu Changchun to the Olympics representing China. He announced at a graduation ceremony of Northeastern University that Liu and his coach Song Junfu would participate in the 10th Olympic Games on behalf of China.





General Zhang, who passed away in Honolulu, USA on October 15, 2001, has been held in high esteem by the Chinese people not only as a great patriot, but also as the supporter of the first group of Chinese to take part in the Olympics. Although eliminated in the preliminary heats in the 100m and 200m sprints clocking 11.1 and 22.1 respectively, Liu has pioneered the way for China's participation in the Olympics - a way full of twists and turns at the time and henceforward.

Olympics History - Nazi Germany, Japan, China, Singapore

The Berlin Olympics

Seeing the pictures from the 1936 Berlin Olympic Opening Ceremony is sickening. With Hitler looking on, each nation's delegation marches into the stadium in perfect goosestep. Most of the teams raise their arm in the "Olympic salute," which looks supiciously similar to the Nazi salute. Countries that will go on to be decimated by the Third Reich march and cheer along with the crowds.

What's interesting to note about the 1936 games is that many of the traditions that are considering integral to the Olympics were started in Berlin. The torch relay, a massive opening ceremony and taping the whole spectacle were started by Hitler's regime.

Hitler even cajoled filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to go to Delphi, carve the Olympic rings into a stone, and film it, so to convince people that the rings were an ancient drawing, not the creation of modern Olympic founder, Pierre de Coubertin


By allowing only members of the "Aryan" race to compete for Germany, Hitler further promoted his ideological belief of racial supremacy. At the same time, the party removed signs stating "Jews not wanted" and similar slogans from the city's main tourist attractions. In an attempt to "clean up" Berlin, the German Ministry of Interior authorized the chief of police to arrest all Romani (Gypsies) and keep them in a special camp .[2] Nazi officials ordered that foreign visitors should not be subjected to the criminal strictures of anti-homosexual laws.

Total ticket revenues were 7.5 million Reichsmarks, generating a profit of over one million marks. The official budget did not include outlays by the city of Berlin (which issued an itemized report detailing its costs of 16.5 million marks) or that of the German national government (which did not make its costs public, but is estimated to have spent US$30 million, chiefly in capital outlays


Gold Silver Bronze Total
1 Germany (host nation) 33 26 30 89
2 United States 24 20 12 56
3 Hungary 10 1 5 16
4 Italy 8 9 5 22
5 Finland 7 6 6 19
6 France 7 6 6 19
7 Sweden 6 5 9 20
8 Japan 6 4 8 18
9 Netherlands 6 4 7 17
10 Great Britain 4 7 3 14

A total of 49 nations attended the Berlin Olympics, up from 37 in 1932. Six nations made their first official Olympic appearance at these Games: Afghanistan, Bermuda, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Liechtenstein, and Peru.

Clips of Berlin Olympics: -
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/blog/fourth_place_medal/post/Opening-Ceremony-Theater-Berlin-1936?urn=oly,99210

USSR in the Olympics

(Water Polo Team)

The Soviet Union only first participated at the Olympic Games only in 1952 in Helsinki Finland. They were the second best nation on the medal tally. The USA was first.

Gold Silver Bronze Total
1 United States 40 19 17 76
2 Soviet Union 22 30 19 71
3 Hungary 16 10 16 42

China in the Olympics

China first participated at the Olympic Games in 1932 in Los Angeles USA. The Republic of China (ROC) would participate in 1948. In 1948, the 52-member delegation from ROC consisted of 33 contenders for track and field, swimming, football, basketball, as well as cycling events. The results were disappointing, as all were eliminated in the preliminary contests.

In 1952, the Republic of China (Chinese Taipei/Taiwan), listed as "China (Formosa)", withdrew from the Games on July 20, in protest of the allowing of the People's Republic of China's men and women to compete.

For the PRC, the men's football and basketball teams and one swimmer joined the Olympics. A total of 40 athletes and officials took part. The football and basketball teams arrived too late to take part in the competition, only the swimmer took part. He was Wu Chuanyu, Men's 100m Backstroke — 1:12.3 (Heat five)



(Wu Chuanyu at the 4th World Juniors and Students Friendship Game held in Bucharest, Romania. He won the gold medal in the 100 meter backstroke swimming event. It was the first time that the Chinese national flag rose in international sports arena)

World War Two and the Olympics

In 1940, the summer Olympics were scheduled for Tokyo, Japan, but were cancelled due to the outbreak of World War II. In 1937, Tokyo was stripped of its host status for the Games by the IOC due to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Games were then awarded to Helsinki, Finland, the runner-up in the bidding. The Games were then scheduled to be staged from July 20 to August 4, 1940. The Olympic Games were suspended indefinitely followed the outbreak of the war, and did not resume until the London Games of 1948.

Germany and Japan were not invited to the 1948 London Olympics. Germany was also banned from the 1920 Antwerp Olympics and 1924 Paris Olympics.

In the 1920 Olympics, Germany was blamed for the start of World War I. Germany, together with other Central Powers allies - Austria, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary. These nations, which by now had new governments, were banned from the 1920 Summer Olympics.

While all other banned nations were invited again for the 1924 Summer Olympics, held for the second time in Pierre de Coubertin's home town of Paris, the ban on Germany was not lifted until 1925. This was likely related to French Occupation of the Ruhr and the Rhineland between 1923 and 1925.

Singapore in the Olympics

Singapore competed in the Summer Olympic Games for the first time at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, England, as a British Crown Colony.

The following Singaporean athletes participated in the games:

Association Football - Chia Boon Leong and Chu Chee Seng
Athletics - Ng Liang Chiang and Valberg Lloyd, Highjump (finished 14th place)
Basketball - Chua Boon Lay


Cold War - Divided Germany in the Olympics

After World War Two, there were three German states found in Germany. There were athletes from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) and the Saarland (A French protectorate)

Before 1956, it was decided that German athletes from West Germany and the French-occupied Saarland would took part in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics separately

The Saarland joined the Federal Republic after 1955, while the East German authorities, which had not taken part in the 1952 Games, agreed in 1956 to let their athletes compete in a united team that used the black-red-gold tricolour, but with additional Olympic rings in white placed upon the red middle stripe, as East German politicians were eager not to compete under the traditional German flag used both by West Germany and even themselves.



They competed together as the United Team of Germany (EUA for French: Équipe unifiée d'Allemagne, German: Gesamtdeutsche Mannschaft) in the 1956 Melbourne, 1960 Rome, and 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

After 1961, despite initially calling for a "united Germany" in the East German anthem, the socialist East German government intensified its separation in Germany, with the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, obstructing travel within Germany even more. The travel of GDR athletes for contests and training sites in the Alps was limited.

As a result of this development, Aahletes from the Soviet-occupied German Democratic Republic (GDR) appeared in a separate team after the United Team effort was discontinued. In five Games, from 1968 Mexico Olympics to 1980 Moscow Olympics and again in 1988 Seoul Olympics, the GDR participated as a separate team.




The separation was completed at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when the two countries used separate flags and anthems. This continued until the German Reunification of 1990 caused East Germany to cease to exist.

Germany in the 1952 Helsinki Games

In the 1952 Helsinki Games, only athletes from West Germany and the Saarland took part. West Germany or the Federal Republic of Germany (GER) claimed exclusive mandate to represent the entire country. Athletes from the Saarland (SAA) competed as a separate team, as the French-occupied state would not join the Federal Republic of Germany until 1955.



Saarland was founded in spring of 1950 in the Saar protectorate which existed from 1947 to 1956 in the Saarland, a region of Western Germany that was (again) occupied in 1945 by France. As a separate team, they only took part in the 1952 Summer Olympics, participating in boxing and canoeing, before being allowed to rejoin the German team for the summer games of 1956. Following a referendum in October 1955 that rejected the Saar statute proposing independence as European territory, thus voting indirectly in favor of access to the Federal Republic of Germany, the Saar treaty of October 1956 allowed the Saarland to rejoin Germany with effect of 1 January 1957.

Starlet Lin Miaoke mimed at Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony

Starlet Lin Miaoke mimed at Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony
Rowan Callick, China correspondent | August 13, 2008 12:00am

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Lin Miaoke, right, replaced Yang Peiyi for the Opening Ceremony performance of Hymn to the Motherland because she was cuter.
LIN Miaoke, the cute nine-year-old girl whose solo Hymn to the Motherland added a human touch to last Friday's opening ceremony, has since been outed as a fake after being flooded with commercial offers.
The ceremony's music director, Chen Qigang, revealed that Lin was not singing but miming to a recording by another girl, Yang Peiyi, who was dumped from the starring role because she wasn't as pretty and had uneven teeth.

And it has also been revealed that the dazzling chain of massive fireworks that traced Route One north from Tiananmen Square to the main Olympic zone during the opening ceremony, amazing television viewers and the audience in the Bird's Nest stadium, was mostly computer-generated.

Music chief Chen told Beijing People's Broadcasting Station that when the opening ceremony team began rehearsing in the Bird's Nest, leaders came from various government agencies to watch, "especially a leader from the Politburo, who gave us his opinion, this has to change".

Thus while Yang cut the best recording of the song, at the Central People's Radio Station she could not be presented to the world because, Chen said, the national interest was at stake.

"The child on camera had to be flawless in looks, in her feelings and in her expression," he said.

Related Links
Re-cap: Your step-by-step guide Multimedia: Re-live the Opening Ceremony In pictures: 101 stunning images Lin had earlier performed in a TV advertisement when she was only six, and in Olympic promotions.

The state-owned China Daily yesterday described her as a "songbird", saying: "She is already well on her way to becoming a star, thanks to her heart-warming performance".

Chen said the organisers had a responsibility to explain why they had made the switch.

"It was the image of our national music, our national culture. And especially since it accompanied the arrival of the national flag in the arena, this was an extremely serious matter," he said.

In the end, he said, the change resulted in "a perfect voice and perfect image, merged together" which he thought was fair to both girls.

"When Lin Miaoke was singing (on Friday), she may not have realised that was not her own voice" echoing around the stadium," he said.

The Beijing Times has further revealed that the 55-second, 29-sequence firework footprints exploding their way up Beijing's central axis was "mostly an animated three-dimensional video that was made over a year. It was not actually live footage except the final stage" at the stadium itself.

Gao Xiaolong, a worker in the video team for the opening ceremony, said the director's staff decided to replace the originally proposed live broadcast with a recording, due to flight restrictions on the helicopters required to film it, and the timing and complexity of the challenge.

A video company named Crystal Stone composed the film.

"Looking at it from today, the video was a bit brighter than the real fireworks," he said.

"But most viewers thought it was live, so we succeeded in the effect we had wanted."

Meanwhile, the former gymnast Li Ning, winner of three Olympic gold medals, who was hoisted by wires to light the Games flame, swiftly received a massive reward for his efforts.

Shares in his Hong Kong-listed sportswear company, which has a 10.5 per cent share of China's market, had slumped 34 per cent this year, in line with the rest of the declining market.

But his starring role in the Games opening gave his stock a massive boost, rewarding him on paper by $34 million when the stock exchange opened on Monday

John Hopkins and University of New South Wales - What Do You Think?

1. The Singaporean government is known for being generous in injecting millions of dollars into international research projects. It can also be cold and ruthless if these projects fail. Singapore ended their collaboration with a medical research arm of the Johns Hopkins University in Singapore, accusing it of not delivering ‘the goods’. This will send "shock waves” through other universities and research institutes and is the first important failure of Singapore's biomedical research projects.

2. The University of New South Wales (UNSW) shut down its campus in Singapore in June 2007. This is because of a financial shortfall of $15 million a year. The target was to ahve 300 students but there wre only 148 students. Some of those enrolled have already paid betwen between S$26,000 and S$29,000 a year. In the first place, it was the Singapore's Economidc Development Board which invited the UNSW in 2004 to start up the campus in Singapore. Do you think this is damaging to Singapore's aim of becoming a global hub for education?

What do you think? Email your views

Civil Disobedience on the Blog

June 6, 2008
The man and his blog posts
By Zakir Hussain

GOPALAN Nair gave up his Singapore citizenship and became an American citizen in 2005. What he did not give up were attacks on Singapore laws and institutions in a blog titled Singapore Dissident.

In entries dating back to 2006, hardly a month goes by without a call for civil disobedience - breaking the law in the hope of changing it without resorting to violence.

'The system has to be forced to change... through telling the Government that their laws are morally repugnant and we will not obey them,' he wrote in December that year.

Praising Singapore Democratic Party chief Chee Soon Juan and his supporters for staging protests, Nair urged them to 'not let up' in their challenges to the authorities.

A month later, he called on Singaporeans to break laws he felt were unjust, like needing a permit to protest, as they would otherwise 'die as slaves'.

When Myanmar citizens here protested against their government's crackdown on protesters last year, he urged Singaporeans to take a leaf from them.

Last December, he called on Malays and Indians here 'to learn something' from protests by Indians in Malaysia against discrimination, and demonstrate outside Parliament against the Housing Board's ethnic integration policy he saw as 'discriminatory'.

Nair also called on the two elected opposition MPs - Mr Low Thia Khiang and Mr Chiam See Tong - to realise that simply bringing issues up in Parliament was fruitless. They should join Chee in civil disobedience to help the people, he wrote.

Neither men responded to his comments.

Another call he has made is one for parents to ask their children not to recite the national pledge in school, saying it was 'a shameless lie'.

In the same vein, last July he urged Singaporeans in the San Francisco Bay area not to attend National Day celebrations organised by the consulate there, arguing that this would give 'legitimacy to the Lee dictatorship in Singapore'.

He has also tried to disrupt several activities involving Singaporeans in California.

At a January 2005 event organised by the Bay Area chapter of Singapore Expats in America, a social group, he wanted to ask about Chee Soon Juan and human rights in Singapore.

According to a Singaporean who was there, Nair, when told this was not the appropriate forum to discuss the issue, then asked for a show of hands from the audience if they were keen to hear out the discussion. When he got no reply, he 'walked out in a huff'.

Last April, he posted a call for Singaporeans to boycott an upcoming meeting with then Minister of State for Education Lui Tuck Yew in San Francisco.

The boycott was to protest against a rise in ministerial and civil service pay, which he said 'amounts to embezzlement'.

Nair has not confined his criticism to ruling party politicians and the state. In a post last October, he called Hougang MP Low Thia Khiang 'a letdown to the cause of democracy'.

In another post that month, WP chairman Sylvia Lim was slammed as a 'shameless woman' for saying Singapore was capable of dealing with rule of law issues on its own and did not need outside interference.

zakirh@sph.com.sg

Politics and Religion - Use of Allah as synonym for God?

June 7, 2008
POLITICS AND RELIGION
For the love of God, stop grandstanding
By John Bradley

A RECENT effort in Malaysia to ban non-Muslims from using 'Allah' as a synonym for 'God', on the pretext that it could 'confuse' the country's Muslim majority, has dealt another blow to the country's reputation for pluralism.
The Herald, a Roman Catholic newspaper, last month cleared the first hurdle in its legal bid to contest the government's decision not to renew its licence unless its Malaysian-language edition ceased to use the word 'Allah'.

In the midst of the controversy, a senior official from Malaysia's Internal Security Ministry said: 'Christians cannot use the word Allah. It is only applicable to Muslims. Allah is only for the Muslim God.'

The statement is contentious on a number of levels. For a start, 'Allah' is an Arabic word used for centuries by Arab Christians as a synonym for 'God', even before Arabic-speaking Muslims existed.

The Malay translation of the bible, in which the word Allah appears, has been used by Christians since the church's earliest days.

More worrying is that the statement paradoxically echoes those of numerous anti-Muslim bigots in the West which portray Muslims as worshipping a God 'different' from that worshipped by Christians and Jews, reinforcing fears that Islam poses a threat to Judeo-Christian values and civilisation.

Remember Lieutenant-General William 'Jerry' Boykin? He was named US deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence in 2003.

In 2005, while recounting a military battle he had fought against Muslims in Somalia, he declared: 'I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.'

When politics, culture and religion are entwined, ignorance usually triumphs. The political motivation for Lt-Gen Boykin's outburst was the US-led 'war on terror', especially as he was addressing a key Bush administration power base: evangelical Christians.

Similarly, Father Andrew Lawrence, editor of The Herald, told the BBC that 'politics and a general election' were the main reasons why the Malaysian authorities decided to raise the issue last year.

But there's also a cultural reason why a Malaysian official could so casually refer to a 'Muslim God': the emergence into the mainstream in Malaysia of Wahhabism, the extremist interpretation of Islam sponsored by the Saudi royal family.

Wahhabism was founded two centuries ago on a belief in the superiority of (Sunni) Muslims and the damning of Jews and Christians as 'infidels'. Historically alien to the diverse Muslim cultures of South- east Asia, Wahhabism spread like wildfire throughout the region in the wake of the 1970s oil boom.

The Saudi religious establishment spent tens of millions of dollars to fund mosques and universities, and offered lucrative scholarships for foreign Muslims willing to complete their religious education at Wahhabi-controlled institutions in Riyadh. It's no coincidence that the ban on Malaysian Christians using the world 'Allah' was first introduced in the early 1980s.

That politics and culture, rather than sound religious understanding, are really at the heart of the debate over the use of the word 'Allah' becomes obvious when Malaysia is compared with Egypt. It, too, has a sizeable Christian minority and a long tradition of Islamic pluralism.

Christians and Muslims in Egypt have lived peacefully together for centuries. But in the 1970s, millions of Egyptians began working in Saudi Arabia, and in many instances, when they returned, they propagated their newly learnt Wahhabi doctrine. At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood was invited back from exile in the Saudi kingdom, and given a greater role in politics.

The result: Egypt's Christians suddenly found themselves under violent attack. Last week, three Christian workers were shot dead in a Cairo jewellery shop by assailants who stole nothing, while in Upper Egypt, three monks were kidnapped by Muslim extremists protesting against the renovation of a church. Egypt's Christian minority is voluntarily shunning Islamic-inspired terms and expressions.

Instead of greeting one another with asalam alaikum (peace be upon you), many now say ahlan (hi). Before starting a meal, instead of saying bismillah (in the name of Allah), they say bismasalib (in the name of the cross).

Where once they said without thought alhamdullillah (praise be to Allah), they now utter nushkrailrub (we thank our Lord).

In a recent Los Angeles Times article on God vs Allah, which was critical of the Malaysian government's stance, the Lebanese-American novelist Rabih Alameddine wrote: 'We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans...to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity.

' It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads - rarely the compassionate God.'

Creating more differences 'is troubling, even dangerous', he concluded. 'I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context. Otherwise, the terrorists win.'

It's advice that the Malaysian authorities might benefit from.

j_r_bradley@hotmail.com

Rising petrol prices prompt switch to 'green' transport

June 8, 2008
Rising petrol prices prompt switch to 'green' transport
By Tan Dawn Wei

With pump prices heading north, motorists here are switching to cheaper alternatives.
Some have given up their cars and moved to public transport. Others have downgraded to smaller cars or two-wheelers. A growing number have opted for hybrid-engine cars.

There's even a six-month waiting time for those who are keen to kit their cars out to run on compressed natural gas (CNG) because of a sudden surge in demand, according to motor workshops.

There were 248 CNG cars on the roads last year, but this has more than doubled to 538 in April this year.

Hybrid cars, or those that switch between petrol and electricity, also shot up in the same period, going by the Land Transport Authority's numbers. Another 289 have joined their ranks, bringing the total to 1,346.

Another popular 'green' choice is public transport. Singapore's total bus and train ridership hit a record 4.78 million rides a day in the first three months of this year.

No cut in petrol duties to cushion fuel hikes
The Government is not about to reduce duty on petrol to help cushion rising pump prices.

The duty - 41 cents for every litre of standard grade petrol and 44 cents for the high-end stuff - is meant to promote public transport and curb excessive use of cars.
... more
The number of bids for certificates of entitlement (COEs) every month has also fallen since the beginning of this year, one more indicator that consumers are staying away from buying new cars.

COE bids for cars up to 1,600cc, for instance, fell from 3,005 bids in February to 2,500 this month.

'People are very cautious about buying big-ticket items now, with oil and food prices going up and property prices and shares moving down. They're adopting a wait-and-see approach,' said Tan Chong Motors' marketing director A.C. Neo.

If they do buy, says the Nissan distributor, small is in.

Borneo Motors, which sells Toyota cars, has also been selling more of its smaller capacity cars than its larger ones, said customer relations general manager Angeline Tan.

Another popular choice now is off-peak cars with the distinctive red plates. They can be driven from 7pm to 7am on weekdays, after 3pm on Saturdays and all day on Sundays and public holidays.

There are about 34,000 of them on the road now, compared to 2,644 just five years ago.

Mr Henry Ang, manager of car dealership Koh Brothers Automobile, said that he has seen a 20 per cent increase in the number of motorists who have switched from regular cars to off-peak cars to save money.

Petrol prices last went up two weeks ago, the 12th consecutive hike since last July. This brings pump prices here to between $2.153 and $2.386.

If you drive a 1,600cc car, that means you pay about $320 a month for petrol, going by the average distance covered. This is $70 more than the $250 you would have paid this time last year.

That bill is likely to go up as analysts expect petrol prices to hit $3 a litre here if oil prices reach US$200 (S$273) a barrel.

But energy consultant Ong Eng Tong of Mabanaft International said that he expects pump prices to end the year closer to $2.50 instead, which is about US$150 per barrel.

'Drivers will pay maybe $50 to $100 extra a month and this is discretionary income,' he said.

dawntan@sph.com.sg