In case you missed the action of the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Singapore won gold medals in the Men's and Women's table tennis team events.

Great stuff, it puts us on track for Singapore Table Tennis Association's objective of winning five gold medals as outlined in their player selection policy for the Commonwealth Games. Note that the selection criteria includes being Singapore citizens.

Table tennis is a sports traditionally dominated by the Chinese. For us to win two team event gold medals ... you have to wonder - are our players secretly from China?

We have 4 reasons to believe so:

1. Well, they really are from China

Isabelle Li (bottom photo second from right) and Clarence Chew (top photo first from right) are the only born and bred Singaporeans on the Singapore table tennis team. The rest of the players hail from Hebei, Liaoning, Harbin, and Beijing.

Nope didn't see Thomson Medical or KK Hospital in the list there.

Guess we don't need another two reasons but what's a list without more than one point, right?

2. Just take a look at our team attire

Source

Source

Look at that red top with a roaring gold lion emerging from the right side of the torso and a gold stripe. Hmmmm ... where did we see something like this before?

Oh look!

Source

I guess the uniform designer forgot that Singapore's colours are red and white.

Or maybe we found the secret to China's winning formula - the uniform. That's why we're doing something similar.

3. Our friendly Southeast Asia neighbours think so.

International perception matters.

Read how the Malaysian papers praised the efforts of their women's table tennis team. They don't think it's a shame to lose to Chinese table-tennis players.

The Star -  "Veteran Beh Lee Wei and her team-mates gave it their all but were no match against Singapore’s China-born players in the women’s table tennis team final at the Scotstoun Sports Campus in Glasgow".

The Star - "It’s just unlucky that they had to meet a Singapore team laden with players imported from China."

This was not the first time our South-east Asian neighbours passed such snide remarks on our table-tennis team.

The official SEA Games 2013 blog came up with this report titled “The Impenetrable Great Wall of Singapore“, which highlighted Singapore’s clean sweep of all the table tennis team gold medals at the Games.

4. The Singapore-born players did not get a chance to play at the quarter-finals, semi-finals, or finals

Thanks to the superb performance of our China-born players who downed our opponents either 3-0 or 3-1 during these matches, our Singapore-born players did not have to break a sweat to collect their gold medals.

Clarence Chew only played 1 match out of the 20 played by the Singapore men's team; Isabelle Li played 3 matches out of 16 played by the women's team.

I mean the aim of the games were to win five gold medals right? Developing our young talents can be done back in the training centre it seems.

Top photo from here.

Find Mothership.SG on Facebook and Twitter.