KUALA LUMPUR: Diving queen Datuk Pandelela Rinong hopes that national aquatics governing body Malaysia Swimming (MS) will work on increasing the country's talent pool of divers.

Despite feeling sad about the current situation in diving, the 2016 Rio Olympics silver medallist acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic had also taken a toll on the development of junior athletes in the national team as well as the state divers.

However, the Sarawakian is still hopeful that the country will produce good divers in the future, provided all relevant parties, including MS and the National Sports Council (NSC), put on a more concerted effort to unearth new talents.

"There is a chance (to produce good divers), just need time to develop (them). To go from the junior (level) to my level is not easy, it needs time.

"I hope the relevant parties, like MS, have plans to increase the talent pool. The NSC's effort is also important because I came from their development programme, so I hope it can be continued," she told Bernama when met at the launching of her own 'P.Zero 1' NFT (non-fungible tokens) here, today.

The media had recently reported that several events in athletics and diving would be dropped from the 20th Malaysia Games (Sukma) due to the lack of state participation.

NSC then issued a statement saying that the cancellations were unavoidable because the affected events failed to secure the participation of at least six states. The Games are scheduled to be held from Sept 16-24.

On a separate note, Pandelela, who will resume training tomorrow after the recent Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, said that she would compete in the Kuala Lumpur Diving Grand Prix in November.

Meanwhile, Pandelela pointed out that the 'P.Zero1' NFT digital artwork was created to share a piece of her story with the world and pay homage to the sport, which had drastically changed her life from a young Bidayuh village girl to an internationally-acclaimed sportswoman.

"P stands for Pandelela while 'Zero1' reflects my journey from nobody to somebody in sports," she said.

Pandelela also said that COVID-19 had taught her to learn new things apart from diving and that led her to discover financial investment, especially in getting to know more about cryptographic assets.

Designed by digital artist Nicholas Chuan, the exclusive NFT collectable 'P.Zero1', which is a collaboration between her management company, Knight Communications, and Prime Sports NFT, is now available for auction via NFT market, OpenSea, at a starting price of RM2,000 from today (Aug 24) until Aug 31.

An NFT is a unique token that exists on the blockchain, meaning it cannot be replicated. This unique token could represent real-world items like artwork or music, with the ability to be traded with a transparent transaction history.

-- BERNAMA