Debated in Parliament on 21 Jan 2014.
Mr Nicholas Fang asked the Acting Minister for Culture, Community and Youth whether the results of the 2013 Southeast Asian Games will lead to (i) any adjustments to the $40 million Sports Excellence Scholarship scheme to include more athletes from lesser known sports; and (ii) a decision to focus on a smaller number of sports to ensure the best chances of achieving results at major games such as the Olympics.
The Government is committed to supporting the aspirations of talented Singaporeans who wish to excel in their chosen sports.
Our High Performance Sports system, introduced in 2013, provides support to more than 1,000 carded athletes across 50 sports. On top of this, we recently introduced the SpEx Scholarships to enable our top and promising athletes to train full-time. The inaugural batch of scholarships was awarded to 64 athletes across 15 sports in September last year. We expect to award more scholarships this year for talented athletes who wish to pursue full-time training. Based on the performances in the recent SEA Games, there are several promising candidates and we look forward to receiving their applications. The $40 million Sports Excellence budget, which Mr Fang mentioned, already provides for this.
The High Performance Sports system and the Sports Excellence (SpEx) Scholarship programme under it are intended to support athletes with the potential and ability to excel at the international level, across all sports. We provide targeted levels of support according to how well the athletes have performed, how far they can go, and how much they are willing to commit to training. We also set clear performance requirements for these athletes, and if there are athletes who do not measure up, then funding support will cease. Hence the support is tied strictly to individual performance, and not to the type or number of sports.
Page: 8
Mdm Speaker, one clarification and supplementary question. Given the recent performances at the 2013 SEA Games and given that it followed very shortly on from the awarding of the SpEx scholarships, perhaps it is a little bit premature to use that as a benchmark as to how the athletes in this first batch performed. Given that the 2015 SEA Games, the 2016 Olympics and subsequent competitions are coming up very shortly, is there a need on the part of the Ministry to want to focus a little bit more to ensure that we attain those high performance results, with a more targeted approach, perhaps not such a broad spectrum as 15 sports?
Mdm Speaker, I would say that we are, indeed, looking at the range of sports and discussing very closely with each National Sports Association (NSA) to see how they can identify athletes in the sports that will be featured in the SEA Games to make sure that they are well prepared to achieve good results during the SEA Games. We are, indeed, taking that focused approach in preparing our athletes and working with the NSAs for the SEA Games.
The Member talked about the performance of the SEA Games in relation to the High Performance Sports system which was recently introduced and the Sports Excellence (SpEx) Scholarship. It is not related because the SpEx programme just started. So, we cannot say because of this, therefore, the results we saw in the recent SEA Games. I wish it were so. But the results of the SEA Games were the results of the years of training and investment that have been put in by the respective NSAs, through the support of the Singapore Sports Council (SSC). With this additional injection that we are putting in now through the SpEx Scholarship and the High Performance Sports system, we think that that would prepare us even better for SEA Games 2015.
PAPERCUTS