Launch of 'Sport in Singapore: Visions of Change' Book and Sport Heritage Exhibition

1.     Good afternoon, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Team Singapore athletes & officials, past and present. Thank you very much for joining us and making this event even more special.

2.     My colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, today marks a very special day in Sport Singapore's history – our 50th anniversary celebration. We gather here to launch “Visions for Change”, looking back but also looking forward, assessing what else we can do and how much further we can go.

3.     This is the third and final instalment from Dr Nick Aplin in his “Sport in Singapore” trilogy. If you ask Nick how long he took to prepare, write, conceive and think of this book and put it together, he will say “about three, three and a half years” very modestly. But it has actually taken a lifetime or half a lifetime, 20 to 25 years of gathering nuggets of history, collecting them all. And he told me that if you look around, all these magazines – he has every single edition, barring three. If any of you have your own editions, please speak to Nick. 

Sport as a Way of Life

4.     Nick's trilogy documents and carefully chronicles how sport in Singapore has evolved over time and across key periods of our history – through our Colonial days, through our Independence, and until today's modern Singapore. His books tell us that sport in Singapore is not static. It is not one-dimensional and we constantly shift, evolve, move with times. And sport in Singapore is in fact very emotional and inspirational in so many ways. Sport in Singapore also grows with the people. It reflects our society. It is a mirror of who we are, and it reflects wider sporting community of our leaders, of our administrators, and strongly supports the process of nation building. 

5.     “Visions for Change” is the last instalment that looks at how we – collectively as a sporting community, collectively came together and organised ourselves. Through the establishment of a sport Statutory Board 50 years ago in 1973, and the partnership that has evolved with our stakeholders over time, to promote and develop sport that supports Singaporeans' aspirations while reinforcing a deep sense of cohesion among people, building the community, and shaping the tapestry of our nation. 

6.     We will have a chance to go down this memory lane, as we walk through the sport heritage exhibition through 50 years of sport magazine covers, on display here. This exhibition is an ode to the people who helped to create and were instrumental behind the scenes, especially in creating Singapore's rich sporting heritage. And each cover tells a special story. You will see what I mean when you have a look around later. 

Live Better Through Sport

7.     The core of Sport Singapore, fifty years on, remains – to encourage people to “Live Better through Sport”. It remains our motto, our key driving principle and our raison d'etre behind sport in Singapore. In many ways, sports is not about an end point, not something that you arrive; It is about a constant journey throughout which we would like everyone to be on. 

8.     I would say the power of sport is undeniable. Like all of you, I was also witness to some of our sporting achievements at many Major Games. From the camaraderie and special bond that children share when they play together in sport, I think each of us can relate to that in many ways as we were, once upon a time, young children together. Whether you made goal posts out of small little bags, or your own water bottles, I think all these memories shape how we see sport and how we relate to one another in our community. There are also heartfelt moments where persons with disabilities rise above the challenges through resilience and grit and demonstrate that like all of us, they can be playing on the world stage, they can represent Team Singapore with conviction, dedication and with a lot of distinction. Each of their stories tell us how through sports, we can build community that is truly inclusive, a lot more accessible – a fair, just and equitable society. 

9.    It is for this reason that we continue to invest strongly in sport and will continue to do so. We have seen the strong growth in sport participation among Singaporeans. Not just on their own but coming together with family and friends in our community. We will see later, stories of how this started through the simple and very humble Pesta Sukan competitions in our constituencies, which later on evolved into inter-constituencies, the rivalry between each division. We will bring a little bit of that back, in the years ahead. We will rekindle the sporting spirit, inter-constituency games. I have asked SportSG to work with PA to rekindle all of these little neighbourly rivalries that add a lot of pizzazz to sports.

10.    We brought the National School Games back to the Singapore Sports Hub, and to me that was special. We saw boys, after the HSBC Rugby Sevens, take to the field and we saw thousands of school boys and girls fill the stadium supporting their schools. And when you look at what it meant to the young junior athlete – to be playing in Singapore's best arena; the memories that they will have with them; the moments of inspiration that they will draw from this event – these are moments that we cannot recreate on any other platform and sport has that unique power to do all of these and more. We have brought in many new emerging diverse sporting events and interests to cater to the growing and diverse interest of Singaporeans, including the hosting of the inaugural Olympic Esports Week in collaboration with the International Olympic Committee earlier this year. 

11.     We have also created more opportunities for young Singaporeans to come forward to excel in sport through our ActiveSG Academies & Clubs. The success of the first academy for football, which we started with, also led to the development of other sport academies in other sports. I am very pleased to say that we have recently also launched Para Sport Academy, providing more pathways and more opportunities, not only for elite sport participation, but for everyone to come forward and take their place on the field, on the track and in the pool.  We have redeveloped old, and built new and refreshed sport centres, that provide better accessibility to sport facilities and programmes. 

12.     Our sporting centres is a hub of not just sporting but very much social activity that goes on in our community. We made some of our ActiveSG centres 'all-weather' so that rain, shine, thunderstorm or bigger thunderstorms, we can still use the pools and other facilities. We have established 20 ActiveSG Academies and Clubs (A&Cs) and made sure that we did not develop them in silos, on their own. It is not just a sporting endeavour as we worked with the Ministry of Education (MOE) to inculcate participation in students. We brought children and youth from different backgrounds and abilities to learn and play, and through playing and taking part in team sports, they forge special friendships across the boundaries of schools – which we cannot achieve so easily in the absence of sports. This in turn helps to build character, allows them to pick up skills such as teamwork, resilience, and leadership. These are not just sporting lessons; there are life lessons.

13.     We have seen these values during our leagues in community participation and competitions such as ActiveSG Cup, National School Games and Pesta Sukan Games. These programmes also mark the start of pathways for those who want to pursue sport competitively later. When I talk to our elite sport athletes and ask them where did they start - inevitably, it was in school, in one of those National School Games or Pesta Sukan. The more we build on this, the greater we will see community participation and the stronger, we will have a pipeline of talent for elite sports.

14.     I am also very happy to say that we have made significant strides since the launch of the Disability Sports Master Plan (DSMP) some seven, eight years ago. We will continue to work on upgrading and evolving the DSMP to refresh our sporting infrastructure and increase accessibility to sports facilities for persons of all abilities. We want it to be accessible, we want the barriers to entry to be lowered. But we also know that building infrastructure alone is not going to be enough, we will need a sustainable pipeline of programmes, good coaches, people who are involved and specialised in the para sports scene, to bring people together and introduce a range of sport programmes for persons with disabilities. More importantly, as we do with unified sports: to have team sports with persons with different abilities participate together. That would be truly special. 

15.     Our Team Singapore athletes, at the elite sport end, unify the nation and help ignite the Singapore spirit every time they participate. I spoke a little earlier about the many successful Major Games that we had – athletes with medals standing as the flag raised up high with the national anthem. All these are moments of identity. We build our identity with these moments. But beyond medals, it is also about the ability to push themselves further, faster, stronger, higher than what they have done. So we celebrate every nation record, we celebrate every personal best and we celebrate every achievement that was produced in adversity. 

16.     I am sure many of us remember those moments where we were, when Yip Pin Xiu won her first Paralympic gold medal, where we were, when Joseph Schooling excelled in Rio in 2016 and where we were when Loh Kean Yew, two years ago now, won his world championship. These and other special moments show us the power of sports in unity. 

Looking Towards the Next 50 Years

17.     As we turn the page on Sport Singapore's first 50 years,  I believe we can do more 50 years on. We can look forward to a more exciting future where Singaporeans will continue to be inspired and witness the transformative role that sport can play in the next few years. I want to give a shout out to the work that we are doing at SportSG in bringing major events into Singapore, and bringing the community together through sports.

18.     We will in 2025 have the World Aquatics Championships right here in Singapore. We will host the SEA Games in 2029 – something that we are already working on is building a pipeline towards cultivating our young athletes, developing them and blooding them so that they will be ready for 2029 We will work on a series of new infrastructure programmes embedded in the community, in the neighbourhoods – the Punggol Regional Sport Centre will be ready in 2024 and Toa Payoh Integrated Development, a truly special development, will take place or will open in 2030. Indeed, also with the takeover of the Sports Hub, the Kallang Alive Precinct will become the heartbeat of our sporting community, our grassroots and school games. We will play host to more world-class sporting and entertainment events. It will also be a testbed for sports innovation, sports technology and sports businesses. We also want to work with international federations to bring them and embed them within Singapore's ecosystem. There's a lot of work. 

Conclusion

19.   As I conclude my speech, I want to remind ourselves of what the President said at inauguration, which I saw both as an inspiration as well as a challenge. President, you said that “the best years of sport are ahead of us”. I truly believe in that. It is both an inspiration to us, but also a challenge for all of us coming together to build sport into something truly special. This is not just in terms of meals and performances, which I believe we will do even better, but to inculcate sport as a value, as a way of life, as a culture, an ethos for all of us to carry as fellow Singaporeans. 

20.     I want to say thank you, Nick and everyone who worked behind the scenes to bring this alive. It takes an exhibition like this, specially curated with a lot of care and with a lot of passion to sport, to bring this alive and to tell fellow Singaporeans how far we have journeyed in the last 50 years. So thank you very much to you, Nick, and to your team, and everyone for making today's event special. All of you have contributed in more ways than one in sport, past and present, and I look forward to your support as we build the journey for the next 50 years in sport. Thank you very much.