Lee Chin has made plenty of media appearances over the last couple of days, as he prepares to jet off to Vancouver to take part in The Toughest Trade. Chin is linking up with the Vancouver Canucks to try his hand at ice hockey, a considerable challenge given that he currently does not know how to ice skate. In return, Vancouver's Alex Auld is taking up hurling. (With a surname like that, he should do fine).
The Wexford man appeared on Newstalk's Off the Ball this evening to speak about the upcoming challenge, along with plenty else.
Throughout the course of the chat, Chin touched on the issue of racial abuse. Chin endured racial abuse when he was making the breakthrough with Wexford in 2012, but said on air that he hasn't had to deal with any since.
His father, however, does have to deal with it. Voon For Chin arrived in Ireland from Malaysia over twenty years ago, yet still faces moronic abuse, as Chin elucidated on air:
My father would still be out having a few drinks and something could be said to him.
He could just walk down the street and something could be said to him. And he'd often tell me about it. He's not the type of guy who sits there and takes it either, he'd act on it.
For a man like him, he's in his fifties now, it's not something he should be having to deal with every day in this walk of life, especially for a man living in Wexford for so long now. He knows everybody in Wexford, and people know him, but he still has to put up with that.
Chin later added that such abuse is "ignorant and rotten".
You can see how Chin gets on in Vancouver on RTE 2 on March 10th.
