From Malaysia with shame

From Malaysia with shame

Indonesia has again repeated its shameless failure in the
Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, incapable of emerging as the overall
champion of the recent biennial event. Our athletes lost the
games held in Kuala Lumpur last week, the same shameless result
the country had to swallow at the first SEA Games in Bandar Seri
Begawan, the capital of Brunei Darussalam, in 1989.

Gone are the years when Indonesia was a Southeast Asian
sporting superpower and if the national sports associations
continue to be managed in the same old manner by the same old
people, achievements more disgraceful than those seen in Vietnam
in 1993 will occur in the future.

Long before the Kuala Lumpur SEA Games opened, many people,
inside and outside Indonesia, believed that our athletes would
have to succumb to their regional rivals because our country has
been suffering harshly from the multi-dimensional crisis for
three years. But delving deeper into the source of the dilemma,
there would appear to be a case for several other causes.

First, National Sports Council (KONI) management seems to have
failed to learn from past fiascoes, especially the one in Brunei
Darussalam, and to digest what that meant for this nation.

Over the past five years, the nurturing of new athletes has
been a total disaster for many reasons. Training should start in
primary schools -- in China they start in kindergarten -- but our
elementary schools do not have the facilities to support the
policy because many of them have been built on limited plots of
land, too small for sports facilities. In this situation we see
that sports instructors are not well respected and get no
opportunity to realize their ideas and vision.

In the management of our sports development, we have seen very
little activity aimed at the preparation of a new generation of
athletes. At the Kuala Lumpur Games we saw the same old veteran
athletes in swimming, tennis, badminton, boxing and gymnastics,
instead of the young ones. While not many of these veterans can
win gold medals, the young ones who guarantee the future have
been forgotten.

In two years from now, the situation in training camps will
look even gloomier. The Ministry of National Education, at this
moment, cannot be expected to pay serious attention to national
sports activities because critical problems within the education
system are causing it enough headaches.

Over the last five years, KONI has organized very few
competitions, both at home or aboard, in an effort to boost the
quality of our athletes. In soccer, financial reasons seem to be
irrelevant because the state-owned Bank Mandiri has contributed
no less than US$10 million annually for the competitions. Yet in
Kuala Lumpur last week, Indonesia failed to win a gold medal,
losing to Thailand.

Our coaches also lack experiences because they are just former
players without coaching experience overseas. Therefore, some
good players have shown themselves to be better than the coaches.
The reason for not sending them abroad is typically Indonesian:
They are unable to speak English. This country is fortunate that
some parents have been successful in training their children to
be prospective tennis, badminton and swimming stars.

Another irritating problem is the lasting effects of president
Soeharto's policy of appointing high-ranking officials, with easy
access to financial resources, to certain posts within sports
development. This policy should be revised immediately because it
is no longer relevant to this country and its current situation.

Mohammad (Bob) Hasan, a business tycoon and Soeharto crony who
was once appointed trade minister as well as being placed in
charge of athletics development, did in fact do his job well and
maintains the post. However, he is now serving a six-year jail
term for corruption on the island of Cilacap in Central Java and
cannot be contacted for any reason.

Rahardi Ramelan, the former vice chairman of the National
Planning Board who has been charged with the development of
gymnastics, is nowhere to be found, even by the Attorney General
who wants to question him for alleged corruption.

Who is responsible for these herculean failures? Part of the
darker side of Indonesian culture has always been the difficulty
to find people who are willing to accept responsibility for such
debacles, either verbally or by deed, such as by quitting the
job. KONI's chairman, the retired Army general Wismoyo
Arismunandar, has been there since 1995 and was reelected in 1999
for another four-year term. For his supporters, surely he is not
in the position to maintain the nation's good name in sport, but
to keep their positions intact.