Committed to supporting the aspirations of talented Singaporeans who wish to excel in their chosen sports

Question 

Mr Nicholas Fang: To ask 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.

Response

Acting Minister Lawrence Wong: 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 (or the Sports Excellence 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 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.