Money vital to boost athletes' performance
Money vital to boost athletes' performance
JAKARTA (JP): Not a single theory, no matter how good it is, on how to lift our athletes' generally poor performance would work without money, a top National Sports Council (KONI) official says.
That was once summed up as UUD by KONI training director Moch. Hindarto. UUD, Indonesian acronym for 'constitution', was defined by Hindarto as Ujung-Ujungnya Duit (it all comes down to money).
But how can poor performance deserve money? Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports Hayono Isman made it clear after Indonesia's bitter Southeast Asian Games loss to Thailand last year that the government would not pour more money into sports if the country's sports performance remained in the doldrums.
But how can Indonesian sports come out of the doldrums if no one is willing to put money into it?
This catch-22 was practically overlooked in a two-day discussion on how Indonesian sports could be commercialized to boost national athletes' performance.
The fact that Indonesians do not hold sports in as high esteem as Europeans or Americans and certain African countries do, and that Indonesians spectators concentrate too much on sports heroes rather than the sports themselves did not seem to be considered in the seminar which ended here on Tuesday.
The most outstanding speaker of the seminar, Kafi Kurnia, suggested that all sports should be commercialized the way golf has been (with its luxurious courses and exclusive memberships). But, perhaps realizing that the suggestion is not realistic, Kafi said that what he meant was that the government should require golf-course developers to build other sports centers, for other popular sports such as tennis.
But asking the government to demand a business community to do something which they may dislike certainly is not realistic.
Moreover, so far no Indonesian golfers excel even at Southeast Asian level, although Jakarta has many golf courses.
Yet, there is an excellent way of making money for sports which Kurnia pointed out.
He talked about exploiting a given sports event by selling everything that can be sold. A textbook example would be the 1994 Asian Games in Hiroshima.
The Games, prepared seven years before the event, cost 28.9 billion yen (US$26.9 million). Sponsorship accounted for 5.1 billion of the cost but the sales of the Games' mascot of PoPPo and CuCCu (a pair of doves) five months before the Games not only covered the remaining cost but left the organizers with a surplus of 100 million yen.
In addition, the Games' organizers generated additional revenues by selling rights to hold a concert, an exhibition and a show during the Games, not to mention the sales of TV rights to private stations.
This is indeed an excellent idea for organizers of a given sports event. Yet, it does little to solve KONI's problem of how to make money from sports in order to jack up the poor performance of its athletes. How could poor performance sell? (arf)