Youth and Sports Ministry out to resolve political crisis in sports organisations

The Youth and Sports Ministry is determined to overcome political and leadership crisis in several sports associations, including the National Sports Council (NSC), said its Minister Khairy Jamaludin. He assured that the issue will be tackled from time to time to ensure it doesn't continue to affect the performance of sports in the country. "Through the Sports Commissioner who has the powers under the Sports Development Act, we will continue to engage and identify problems in sports associations. "We admit there are several sports associations that have politicking, internal conflicts for posts and other issues. There are some whose registration was cancelled and we need to come up with a new association. We will take all this into consideration," he said in reply to a supplementary question from Senator Datuk Boon Som Inong at the Dewan Negara, here, today. Boon had asked about the government's measures to resolve leadership and political crisis within sports associations since it has affected performance and results. Khairy said the Sports Commissioner will also be reminded not to wait for a crisis to crop up in an association before action was taken. "We are not interfering, but we will always advise and give advise and draw guidelines to find a solution. "We don't want individuals who are too obsessed with posts in associations, as the objective is to improve the quality of sports in the country because that is far more important," he said. Answering the original question from Senator Roslin Abdul Rahman on steps by the ministry to boost the performance of national athletes, Khairy said the ministry carried out various programmes to identify new talent at the national and regional level. Khairy said 5,582 athletes were undergoing training under 44 foreign coaches and 112 local coaches at 252 training centres nationwide. "From this number, 47 elite athletes were absorbed for training in the 2016 Rio Olympics programme which is targetted to win the country's first ever gold medal," he said. The ministry will also cooperate with the Education Ministry through the Talent Identification Program (TIP) which conducts a Level 1 screening test on students nationwide to gauge their performance. The test is carried out based on 11 types of sports, and 12,551 were tested from January to June this year in terms of their body size and speed, of which 2,511 were identified to have the potential to become future national athletes. "The ministry has also embarked on programmes to produce local coaches through the National Coaching Academy, whereby 1,078 Level One coaches are being trained so far," he added.