SINGAPORE: "Why not us, too?" Call it a case of sour grapes or plain curiosity, but television and print images of the Olympic torch coursing through neighbouring countries have caused some people here to scratch their heads and ask: Why didn't the flame stop by Singapore?

This has been a point of discussion for readers who felt moved to write in to newspapers, for netizens and even executives from the financial industry.

One from Credit Suisse couldn't resist raising the question during a forum with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong earlier this week. "How come the Olympic torch has bypassed Singapore?" the banking executive asked during the dialogue organised by media company Thomson Reuters.

The instant response from Mr Lee, who had up till then been fielding questions related mostly to economic and political matters, replied: "I don't know."

When the audience's laughter died down, Mr Lee continued: "I do not see any significance in it. I don't think we specifically made a bid for them to come. Neither did we ask them not to come."

If Singapore had made a request, the sacred flame might have landed here.

The media coordinator of the Beijing Torch Relay Centre told Weekend TODAY, the Omani city of Muscat was the first to ask for the torch to visit — and it got its wish.

However, Singapore's cultural paucity and political baggage may have also been behind the flame's no-show here.

Every four years, the tour of the torch is a tremendous marketing exercise for all participants, despite the political protests that often cloud the festivities. Every pit-stop is effectively allowed to show off its cultural equivalents of the Eiffel Tower and Taj Mahal to a global audience, while people cheer on the specially-chosen men and women bearing the Olympian symbol of peace, friendship and fair play.

Hence, the host country puts great thought into creating, what the International Olympic Committee (IOC) calls, the "flavour" of the relay.

Beijing, venue of the 2008 Olympics, opted to display its clout by rolling out a torch relay that crosses so many places that it will make history as the longest ever: 137,000 kilometres over 130 days.

In all, the "Journey of Harmony" passed through nine Asian cities — a route imitating the old Silk Road — before landing last week in Hong Kong and Macau for the domestic leg. It is the norm that the venue's surrounding countries will see more of the flame than will other parts of the world.

This is, after all, only the third time that an Asian city is hosting the prestigious Games — the last one being in 1988 in Seoul.

But Singapore's exclusion from this relay has been somewhat puzzling.

Netizens have noted how the torch travels to Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, yet "bypasses" Singapore, which lies neatly between Malaysia and Indonesia?

Some Singaporeans also wondered why the host country of the inaugural Youth Olympics in 2010 did not get to receive the flame.

The guessing game has resulted in at least one conspiracy theory floating in cyberspace: It's an intentional snub.

In July 2004, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who was sworn in as Prime Minister the following month, visited Taiwan amid protests from China. During this time, according to the online chatter, Beijing was likely planning the relay route (after winning the hosting bid in 2001) and decided to show its displeasure by excluding Singapore from the list of stopovers.

Is it possible that four years on, China is still seething from that episode? As Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew pointed out in a recent interview with Taiwan's Central News Agency, China still has not signed a free trade agreement with Singapore while the Sino-Kiwi deal, which was initiated after Singapore's, has been sealed.

When asked for the key considerations behind the relay route map, the Beijing Torch Relay Centre cited one as a way of "increasing the friendship between Chinese people and the people of the countries along the Silk Road", said the media liaison office in Mandarin.

The relay is often politicised. When Beijing unveiled the Journey of Harmony, analysts zeroed in on the inclusion of two politically sensitive places: Taipei, which split from China 59 years ago; and Tibet, the autonomous region with violent factions calling for a breakaway from China.

Taiwan eventually became the first ever to reject the flame's visit in order to assert its sovereignty.

As for Tibet, when the torch scaled Mount Everest on Thursday, observers read the move as China's attempt to bolster its claims over Tibet.

Seoul, host of the 1988 Games, certainly had political concerns. One of its considerations was a course passing through countries with which Seoul had no diplomatic ties, "to provide an opportunity for improvement of relations with those nations", Seoul said in its official report published online.

Politics aside, perhaps Singapore lacks compelling intrinsic significance for the Olympic flame to visit.

According to official reports that documented the thinking behind the relay routes, the organisers usually rally around four key factors: Economy, efficiency of security, diplomacy and culture.

For the 1988 Seoul Games, the organisers had considered stopping at the "birthplaces of ancient civilisations", a category that 43-year-old Singapore does not fall under.

The only recorded time that Singapore featured on a host country's radar was when Tokyo was planning for the 1964 Olympics. Japan had entertained the idea of blazing an overland Eurasian path by jeep to as far as Singapore, but eventually decided against it because it was "not practical economically or geographically, nor in the time it would require for the relay", said the organisers in their official report.

The Japanese eventually dropped Singapore from its list, which was whittled down to 12 foreign cities.

That included moving from New Delhi to Rangoon, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Hong Kong and Taipei, before ending up in Okinawa for the domestic tour.

But while the flame — now making its rounds in mainland China — didn't come here, Singaporeans certainly aren't excluded from the relay.

Later this month, the Suzhou leg will see five flame-bearers from Singapore: The chiefs of the Republic's three mobile phone companies — SingTel Singapore's Mr Allen Lew, StarHub's Mr Terry Clontz and MobileOne's Mr Neil Montefiore — as well as Channel NewsAsia sports reporter Patwant Singh and 28-year-old engineer Kamal Akhtar.

As these men run through the streets of Suzhou, the city folks may just remember the Singaporean part in creating their Suzhou Industrial Park.

So although China's Olympic torch did not come to Singapore, Singapore went to China. - TODAY/ac