Sze Yuen Leung of Macao is slouched in his gaming chair before his team’s match. The camera is trained on him. It is 9 a.m. and Leung yawns in his chair while cracking his fingers at full stretch. In the following 20 minutes, he and his four teammates convincingly hammer their opponents at League of Legends (LoL). They then get up, shake their hands, and are off the stage, soaking in the applause of several hundred onlookers.
The scene was perhaps an encapsulation of what the future of sports could look like. “After a while, nobody will be playing the other sports,” United Arab Emirates’ Harib Sami boldly suggests.
The over-arching message of the Asian Games in Hangzhou is how China and the world are looking into the future where technology will be deeply intertwined in the way of life and sport, too. The setting for the Esports’ bow in the Games as a medal event showed how the present is paving the way for the future.
