(Reuters) - Burma won its first two gold medals at the Asian Games in the popular southeast Asian sport of sepaktakraw on Saturday, though the excitement proved too great for a team official who fainted and was hospitalised.
The golds came on the final day of competition at the Asian Games for the resource-rich country which has been ruled by a military-backed government for nearly 50 years.
After a tie breaker that saw both sides go neck and neck in desperate, fighting rallies, Burma finally nicked it 17-16 with Burma's team leader, Nyan Htun, taken away on a stretcher by emergency medical personnel and rushed to hospital.
"He was shocked ... and just collapsed," Myanmar's head coach Kyaw Zin Moe told Reuters as medics checked his vital signs.
His latest condition wasn't immediately clear.
The double sporting victory for Burma comes at a politically sensitive time for the nation just weeks after it held an election widely condemned as rigged to prolong military power behind a facade of democracy.
The Asian Games kicked off on November 12, just a day before Burmese democracy icon and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was released after seven years of house arrest.
At a post match news conference when the matter of Aung San Suu Kyi's release was raised, the players chuckled politely and an Asian Games official cut off the coach in mid-sentence. "Only questions related to the match may be directed," said the official.
Afterwards, Moe, the Burmese coach said the team were resding inside the tents without TVs in Guangzhou, not like the athlets from other nations who stayed in hotels; that is why, he did not know about it when Aung San Suu Kyi was freed. "We're not interested. Sport is just only to eat biscuits. If you want to be a good player you just have to concentrate on eating biscuits (see the photo), not business, not politics and not social welfare."
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