Getting through customs and immigration in Kuala Lumpur proved more difficult than expected. It wasn't my boozy swagger and face full of stubble that got me stopped at the airport, but silly antics on behalf of a "fellow Taiwanese."
A squat man with wavy hair held up my queue with what turned out to be some daring political stunt: he single-handedly changed the name of his country on his passport from "Republic of China" to "Republic of Taiwan."
Fed up with the five-minute delay, I crossed the red line to see what was the matter, and if my translation services could be of use.
I stifled a chuckle as I saw his defiled passport, especially the upper right-hand corner where he had taken the liberty to cross out the word "China," and added the word "Taiwan" underneath -- in hand-lettered blue ballpoint.
I then had to accompany the perpetrator of this passport crime and the befuddled immigration agent into a back room where the dispute was eventually settled by a supervisor.
Safely in Malaysia, the Tai-wanese man apologized for my inconvenience and added what he thought was the real problem: the immigration official wanted money!
Later I met up with someone who had definitely paid his dues in the BMX competition: Matt Hoffman. He has more X-Game gold than anyone else, and has virtually pioneered this young sport.
Still competing in X-Game competitions while performing his other duties of running Matt Hoffman Bikes, doing demos, and running his own promotion company. His promo company sponsors ten or so events a year, loosely under the Crazy Freaking Biker Series banner, or CFB for short.
When asked about his too many gold medals, and possibly retiring from the sport to pursue other ventures, Hoffman says it's a possibility, but, "I don't know what I would do if I didn't ride."
Besides being a top rider, Hoffman nearly invented the bike in 1991 when he bought machining equipment and began to hand-manufacture 500 or so bikes a year. After making a trip to Taiwan, he marveled at local companies' technology because they have smaller margins of error -- and decided to switch his production to Taiwan.
"Before, this sport was so neglected and out of the mainstream that I had to make my own bikes. I bought some tooling machines to fashion a frame and threw in the parts for people to put together themselves," he said.
Now, he makes around 20,000 bikes a year in Taiwan, and he's been quite happy with quality standards.
If that weren't enough to keep him busy, Hoffman also just published his autobiography, The Ride of My Life.
Such duties keep Hoffman out of the judging box, but it doesn't keep him too far outside as the five judges -- all Americans -- are employed by Hoffman's promotion company, and manage all other BMX affairs at the Asian X Games, from scoring to course design and even scheduling.
Another veteran of the X Games is Sasha Steinhorst, who is also a member of the World Cup of Skateboarding: one of two bodies that govern skateboarding.
Steinhorst was surprised that none of the Chinese-Taipei competitors qualified for the skateboarding finals.
Two of Chinese-Taipei's top hopefuls, Hung Yao-Te (黃耀德) and Huang Po-Hsin (Jacky, 黃博鑫) took 15th and 17th places, respectively, in an earlier qualifier. Not a bad performance considering the field had 31 participants. Unfortunately, only the top ten could advance. Four of the ten came from Australia, two from China, two from Thailand, and two from Malaysia.
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