Money plays big role in SEA Games

Money plays big role in SEA Games

CHIANG MAI, Thailand (Reuter): As elsewhere in the sporting world, many athletes at the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games are striving for dollars as well as for gold medals.

In addition to thousands of dollars spent by governments and sponsors to equip and outfit the athletes, many of the 10 participating countries at the biennial SEA Games in Chiang Mai give winning athletes cash incentives, officials said.

"We believe that the reward is a motivation," Phua Tai Neng, Malaysia's deputy chef de mission, told Reuters on Tuesday. "Malaysia has been giving cash rewards for about five years."

Phua, who is director of the International Preparation Division of the National Sports Council of Malaysia, said his country, like others, is prepared to spend thousands of dollars to reward its star athletes.

Malaysia gives an individual gold medalist 5,000 ringgit, or about US$2,000. Team members also win a large cash reward.

The Malaysians have won eight medals so far and Phua said the goal was to bag 50 golds by the end of the games on Sunday.

Some countries that are less likely to win medals, like Cambodia or Brunei, offer much higher rewards, officials said.

Cambodia's First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh has pledged to give $10,000 to individual gold winners, and $30,000 for a team that wins. Solo silver and bronze winners were offered $6,000 and $3,000 respectively, while teams could win $20,000 or $10,000 for a silver or bronze.

Cambodia has not yet won any medals.

Quality

Malaysia, like many other countries, has also spent tens of thousands of dollars on foreign coaches to help bring their teams up to world standard.

Malaysia is keen to improve the quality of its athletes because it is hosting the 1998 Commonwealth Games, said Phua.

"Being the hosts, we know our athletes must be able to put out a credible performance," he said. "We lacked high-caliber coaching expertise so we took in a lot of foreign coaches."

Malaysia now has about 70 foreign coaches at the national level who focus on Commonwealth Games events. About 10 of them are here at the SEA Games.

Other countries hire only a few foreign coaches to enhance specific sports. Singapore, for example, spent about S$6,000 ($4,285) a month to hire former world billiards champion Robby Foldvari to coach the team for the past five months.

Fears of conflict with official sponsors have played a part in these games, and Thailand temporarily sacked its soccer team's much-loved manager, Thawatchai Sajjakul, over worries of losing sponsorship money.

Thawatchai, a businessman who spent a lot of his own money to train the Thai team, was reinstated on Tuesday after briefly losing his job over a potential breach of contract with SEA Games sponsors, Thai media reported.

Some members of the soccer team were seen wearing warm-up suits with the Singha beer logo during a televised match against Vietnam. Singha is the soccer team's sponsor.

Carlsberg, a fierce competitor to Singha, is a main sponsor of the SEA Games and paid nearly 60 million baht ($2.4 million) for those rights.