At President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration ceremony on Monday last week, four of Taiwan’s all-time greatest veteran pitchers led the crowd in singing the national anthem. As well as winning the approval of many baseball fans, this arrangement also highlights our new president’s respect for sports culture.
However, what interests people in the sporting sector even more is one of the main sports-related proposals that Lai put forward during his election campaign and also mentioned in his inauguration speech, namely that he would upgrade the Sports Administration to become a standalone “ministry of physical education and sports development.”
Furthermore, this is one of the few major tasks on which the ruling and opposition parties have a consensus. The sports sector now expects the president to make good on this policy proposal, but following the promised upgrade, would the increased staffing and funding that go with ministerial status be enough to solve the difficulties facing the sporting sector?
In reality, organizational governance mindset, strategy and actions are what would decide whether the upgrade is effective or not.
The first point to consider is that the Sports Affairs Council, which was the forerunner of the Sports Administration, had a policy of placing equal emphasis on public participation and competition. During the Sports Administration era, this has been adjusted to a triple policy of public participation, competition and business, and the administration’s organizational structure was adjusted accordingly.
Unfortunately, the public sector mentality of “only sweeping the snow from one’s own front door” caused a lack of integration in the organization’s internal business, and the result of each department doing its own thing has been to expend twice as much effort to obtain half the result.
The concept of “popularizing and commercializing competitive sports” is an important framework for promoting organizational integration. The “popularization” part stresses that promoting sport cannot just be a matter of seeking success in competition, and that the most important thing is to build a “sport pyramid” based on promoting physical exercise from the bottom up. Unfortunately, the emphasis of developing sporting activity in schools is on winning or losing, instead of fostering the habit of lifelong physical exercise. As well as possibly fostering successful athletes only to see them drop out later, this approach also leads to an uneven distribution of resources, with government resources solely favoring the sporting elites of a small number of schools.
The “commercialization” part is a developmental policy of injecting commercial thinking into certain sports that have a broad base of popular support and providing them with convenient administrative services to facilitate business development. The current policy of welfare-style subsidies has everyone smiling, but in the long term it would not only weaken the motivation of non-governmental sports organizations to develop, but would also fail to strengthen business foundations.
Due to the lack of organizational integration, the commercialization policy has failed to integrate core industries. In this regard, it would make sense to establish an interdepartmental and cross-functional commercial development working group and take stock of each department’s industrial or commercial strong points to propose appropriate business policies. This would truly correspond with the Sports Administration’s triple policy of public participation, competition and business.
The second point is that social shifts and changes have imbued contemporary sporting activities with a wider range of functions from sustainable development and social cohesion to city branding campaigns and the export of local culture. Sports play a key role in various business sectors, including sports tourism, sports culture and creativity, sports technology and so on. Furthermore, Taiwan’s sporting goods manufacturing industry has long occupied a place in the global sports equipment supply chain. All social groups have a demand for sports, such as physical exercise for seniors, physical development for young children, workplace exercise promotion and so on.
For Taiwan, restricted as it is by its weak national status and very limited diplomatic relations, along with the complicated political relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, using our participation in international sporting events has become an important way for us to maintain our international relations.
In short, administrative departments should try to shift the focus of sports development away from being limited to winning or losing contests to acting as the best cross-industry, cross-community and transnational matchmaker, and they should also improve their pattern and vision of governance.
Major international sporting events hosted in Taiwan, such as the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung and the 2017 Summer Universiade in Taipei, allowed us to see firsthand the attraction of international events, while at the same time giving administrative departments a chance to demonstrate their competence.
From the Taipei Universiade to the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta and the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Taiwan’s attainments in competitive sports have been closely related to the incorporation of the National Sports Training Center in Kaohsiung and the funding generated by the Sports Lottery. The newly established Taiwan Institute of Sports Science, also in Kaohsiung, is soon to start playing a supporting role.
While looking forward to the implementation of Lai’s policy pledge, the sports sector also hopes that the sports authority, after being upgraded to ministry status, would propose highly strategic policies that integrate industry, government, academia and research resources, and use their combined strengths to write a new page in history.
Huang Yu is a professor in National Tsing Hua University’s Department of Kinesiology.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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