Ready, set, fight: Thailand, Cambodia spar to stake claim on Mekong boxing at SEA Games
- Kun Khmer and Muay Thai – boxing disciplines from Cambodia and Thailand, respectively – use fists, elbows and legs, and evoke national pride
- Cambodia, host of the SEA Games, has listed the discipline as Kun Khmer – prompting Thailand to refuse to enter its fighters into the competition
As Southeast Asia’s finest athletes descend on Phnom Penh for the Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games), Thai and Cambodian keyboard warriors are duking it out online over who owns the origin story to the Mekong region’s rich history of boxing.
Laos and Myanmar entered their fighters in the Kun Khmer competition. But Thailand would not accept the blow.
Federations representing Muay Thai, a sport whose gyms pepper the kingdom’s tourist areas and are a key brand in its soft-power marketing, said they would not take part, while insisting it “was not a boycott”.
Though fighters themselves say the punches, strategies and rules are very similar – or even the same – the rights to naming the skill have for long stirred nationalistic debate between Thailand, Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy, and its much smaller neighbour Cambodia.
