The Future of Sport in Singapore, Part I

Singapore's recent silver medal for the women's team table-tennis event in the Beijing Olympics caused controversy in Singapore. All three members of the team were China-born athletes who came to Singapore as a result of the government's foreign talent scheme. They were imported from China at a young age, offered citizenship, and given a stipend to play their sport for Singapore.

I wish to address the effectiveness of the foreign talent scheme in the sporting arena, before moving on to address the question of sport in general as government policy, and then offering concrete proposals for governmental action.

This essay will be published in three parts. Part I will focus on the foreign talent scheme, assessing its aims and achievements. Part II will focus on sports policy in Singapore, ask what its goals should be, and assess how Singapore meets them. Part III will focus on concrete proposals for Singapore to follow, and highlight successful examples inside and outside Singapore that we can emulate.

Part I: The Foreign Talent Scheme

The government asserts that this policy increases the level of competition for Singaporean athletes, thus raising local standards for sport overall. In the face of increased competition, local athletes will also improve alongside the imported athletes. The foreign talent scheme has been in place for well over a decade. Li Jiawei, for instance, was recruited when she was 14 and is now 27. This is sufficient time to measure the success of the scheme. A decade is generally the time needed to train a world-class athlete from scratch. Athletic careers, especially in the more physically demanding sports, rarely last more than two decades. The prime time of an athlete's career is generally between the 10th and 20th year in a sport.

Our government's goals are to win medals at major competitions. By their own measure, however, the scheme has not worked. At the Beijing Olympics, only imported athletes came close to winning medals (the table-tennis women, and Tao Li in the Swimming). At the 2006 Asian Games, Singapore did well with eight gold medals, but did so in sports that we have no imported athletes- sailing, bowling, bodybuilding. Our one other gold came from Tao Li in swimming. Of our five golds at the 2006 Commonwealth Games, four were by table tennis imports and one in shooting, a sport with no imports. By the government's own measure, the policy has not met its stated aim of producing locally-born and trained athletes who win medals at major international sporting events. On the contrary, in sports with imported athletes, no medal-winning locals had been produced in over a decade. Meanwhile, Singapore succeeds in sports with no imported athletes.

The assumption is that by introducing foreign-born players of high talent into Singapore's system, local standards are raised and competition between athletes is increased, with the end result of greater achievement overall. This assumption is fundamentally flawed. It extends from a comparison with business, where the lowering of borders and tariffs increases competition within the local economy, which then forces companies to lower costs, increase efficiencies and raise standards. Unfortunately, this analogy with sport does not work. The comparison is flawed because sport, by definition, is globalised and openly competitive. Singapore athletes already compete against the best in the world on a regular basis, and have done so since we became an independent country. Athletes are constantly trying their best to beat other athletes from all over the world, and introducing more athletes into the system does not change that fact.

On the contrary, while introducing more talent into the system might raise the standard for sports at the local level (within Singapore), the overall standard decreases because money, time and other resources that might have been invested in local athletes are instead spent on the imported talents. Worse, because these imported talents are already more talented than local athletes, their continued success then justifies greater investment in them. For example, the government exempts male imported athletes from National Service, while Singapore-born athletes have to face severe difficulty in practising their sport for two years.

A comparable situation which many Singaporeans can relate to is that of the English football's Premier League. By coincidence, the league was founded in 1992, and the Bosman ruling (which removed any restrictions on citizenship within the Premier League) was passed down in 1995. The league has thus had unrestricted foreign players for roughly the same length of time as Singapore's sports foreign talent scheme. The league's standard is the highest in the world, and competition between clubs and players within the league is tremendously fierce. The UK government argues that the importing of foreign players will raise the standards of the game within England. Yet the England team has struggled, going out of the World Cup tamely and failing to qualify for the European Championship. Worse, there appears to be very little young talent rising through the ranks for the English national team.

The reason is that English football coaching at the under-14 level is generally poor (Players can sign with clubs at 14). Methods are outdated, there is a lack of good football coaches, and there is a lack of investment. The government maintains a hands-off, laissez faire policy, assuming the competition between schools and youth clubs will ensure standards are high. However, because of the lack of money, there is not enough resources and infrastructure. Many schools have sold off their playing fields. Coaches are attracted to higher wages at professional clubs. The government does not have a comprehensive policy. As a result, the majority of young English players end up with poor fundamentals and are not signed by clubs when they turn 14. Many players with talent but who were not trained in proper fundamentals are rejected.

By contrast, Great Britain's great success in the recent Beijing Olympics was the result of vastly increased amounts of funding (largely with proceeds from the national lottery) coupled with planning, foresight, and investment in infrastructure. National training centres in a number of sports have been established or had their funding significantly increased. The best coaches and sports directors have been appointed. The best athletes are groomed for a young age. As a result, Team GB has its best result since 1908: 19 golds, 47 medals overall.

This practice is not limited to rich countries. Jamaica established its High Performance Training Centre in Kingston some years ago, and produced a man named Usain Bolt. In fact, a glance down the Beijing Olympics medal table shows little correlation between success and a country's wealth, or size, or ethnicity. The Scandinavian countries- all about as rich as Singapore and about the same size- won medals. So did poorer countries like North Korea, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Tunisia and Trinidad & Tobago. Tiny countries like Belgium, Slovenia, and Latvia all won golds. Among the Asian countries, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and again North Korea and Mongolia won golds.

In fact, what distinguishes the countries at the top of the table is not population size (For example, Australia has only 20 million people, Netherlands has 16 million), nor wealth (Jamaica, Kenya, Ethiopia and Belarus are not very wealthy), nor ethnicity (China topped the table, and South Korea and Japan were close behind), but a national commitment to sporting excellence that is backed by a long-term governmental commitment and massive investment.

Clearly, a comprehensive national policy is needed. But what form should it take? What should its goals be? To address this, we need to understand the role of sports in national policy. I address this in Part II of my essay.