Asian Cup 2008
More actions
The Asian Cup 2008 or Asian Cup was an international team-based competition held on October 1st, 2008[1]. It featured 8 participating communities, with the condition that all the spinners in a community's team had to be considered racially Asian to take part. In this way it became the first competition that chose to exclude spinners based on race, rather than the community they were in.
It was later revived in part as the Asian Tournament 2013.
History
The Asian cup was arranged in September 2008, with the initial deadline for community lineups being the 1st Oct 2008. Communities situated in Asia took part such as TWPS, JEB and PDS to name a few, but curiously UPSB was also allowed to sign up. The competition was explicitly for spinners from Asia, which resulted in UPSB only being able to choose racially Asian spinners for their lineup such as Minwoo from GPC and Chautran, with non-asian spinners such as Eriror being excluded.
This raised a little concern over the fact that it could be considered racist. When replying to concerns that non-Asians could not join the international event that would accept spinners from the United States and Germany, Zombo said "that's like saying humans should be able to compete in a horse race". Ultimately the concerns were dismissed in favor of the large Asian population in the pen spinning community and UPSB entered with an entirely Asian roster.
Consisting only of two rounds, the event was relatively short, with KPSA coming first place and UPSB 2nd. The first round consisted of individual videos, while the second round was collaboration videos between all the individual spinners from a given community team.