The Rayleigh Torchbearers On July 6th

There’s a list of the Olympic Torchbearers for Rayleigh here.

As you can see there, six of the 14 Rayleigh Olympic Torchbearers are pupils at Fitzwimarc School, nominated by Lloyds TSB, who are one of the “Presenting Partners” of the torch relay. There’s an interview with one of the six, Sophie Riches, on the Rochford Life website, who was selected to represent Great Britain at last years European Youth Olympics and won the 1500 metres!

For the rest, most have Essex or London connections. One of these torchbearers, Tony Collins, is interviewed on Rochford Life here. There’s not much information on the official webpage about Jamie Monteith, but a Google search finds the following on the Arsenal website:

Arsenal Football Club are delighted to announce that Arsenal in the Community’s Jamie Monteith has been selected to carry the Olympic torch on July 9 through Rayleigh in Essex.

Jamie leads on Arsenal?s social inclusion programme, Kickz, in Elthorne Park. The programme partners the police with the football industry and sees Arsenal managing six separate projects across four London boroughs; Islington, Hackney, Camden and Westminster. The scheme believes in the notion of ?sport for good’ rather than ?sport for sport’s sake’ and prioritises social contributions ahead of sporting outcomes.

Jamie has been chosen to join more than 7,300 inspirational individuals to carry the Olympic Flame during its 8,000 mile journey around the UK before it arrives at the Olympic Stadium on July 27 to signify the official start of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Potential torchbearers were nominated through a variety of programmes run by LOCOG and London 2012 sponsors. They aimed to recognise and reward people with a story of personal achievement and/or contribution to the local community…..

One torchbearer who stands out from the rest is Jason Hsuan, described as being 68 years old and from New Taipei City. As the sponsoring companies are nominated people ‘with a story of personal achievement’ , could it be this Jason Hsuan, who went from a forced labour camp in communist China to president of the Taiwanese electronics corporation, TPV ? He was born in 1943, so is 68 or 69… Maybe someone could let us know !

… as the president of the largest LCD display manufactures in the world, Jason Husan looks more like an elegant scholar rather than an ambitious tycoon.

One of the first lessons Hsuan learned is humility. One day while working for General Electric Hsuan heard a broadcast congratulating the winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, who also was working for GE. Hsuan was shocked to learn that the individual, who wore simple suits and maintained a low-key demeanor had won the Nobel Prize. Hsuan took this example as a lesson to remind him to be humble.

As Hsuan related in a speech at Wuhan University, the experience of selling tea eggs as a child provided the most valuable lesson for him. Hsuan lived with his grandparents in China during his childhood; his parents along with his siblings had fled to Taiwan following the Communist ousting of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in 1949. During his childhood, he sold tea eggs to earn his living. Because he just sold only a small amount of eggs each day, Hsuan began to move around theaters and revise his recipe, causing his sales to increase greatly. Hsuan said that the lesson he learnt from this is that a successful seller is made in the frontline of marketing.

Given his family background, Hsuan’s childhood in China was tough. His father had been a textile manufacture and his uncle had served in the Nationalist government. Therefore Hsuan was labeled a “capitalist roader” and was sent to a forced labor camp in southwest China at the age of fifteen. When he was eighteen, Hsuan contracted tuberculosis and was subsequently permitted to go to Taiwan to be with his family.