KUALA LUMPUR, April 5 — Facing some criticism about her performance as the youth and sports minister, Hannah Yeoh said she’s laid the groundwork to develop sports that one day could placate a nation hungry for international success.

Yeoh, the Segambut MP who once admitted that overseeing sports development is something outside her comfort zone, took some of the blame for Malaysia’s poor medal tally at last year’s South-east Asian (SEA) Games and Asian Games.

The Malaysian contingent won 175 medals at the former tournament but fell short of the 40 gold medals it had set as a target. Still, the Asian Games contingent surpassed expectations in what is seen as a much more prestigious tournament, bagging 30 medals, including six gold and eight silver, three more than what it set out to achieve.

In sports, success is usually defined by how many medals a country has won. But Yeoh believes relying solely on that indicator to base criticism tends to oversimplify the complex debate around sports development.

One of the major factors dragging down Malaysia’s standing in the world of sports, according to the minister, is the dearth of athletes competing in sports that can win many medals, such as swimming, track and field, and martial arts.

"The critics will look at last year’s SEA Games and Asian Games and say you’re not doing anything,” Yeoh said in an interview with Malay Mail at her parliamentary office recently.

"But to fix a problem like this, the problem of widening the pool (of athletes) means I have to try to increase accessibility to sports facilities, is this something I can develop in just 24 months or 36 months even?

"So this is the impatience I feel people need to understand that when you want to fix the ecosystem, it is going to take time. But we are not sitting around doing nothing.”

New focus

Swimming and track and field are among the most popular individual sports globally, and Yeoh said they will be the new main areas of focus for the National Sports Council (NSC) under Yeoh’s stewardship.

Malaysia already has capable athletes competing in these sports at the top level, but they are small in number because past administrations have prioritised and invested millions of ringgit into team sports like football, rugby and hockey.

The Segambut MP said her priority now would be to spur grassroots interest in track and field and swimming, but conceded that training facilities for the two sports are limited.

To overcome that, Yeoh said she initiated a policy that gives free public access to existing sports facilities, owned either by NSC or local councils.

Among the most notable programmes is the free swimming class for children, which Yeoh hopes will be the catalyst to develop swimming interest at a very young age. The programme is also meant to dismantle class barriers. Swimming has largely remained a wealthy household’s sport because they have both access to pools and swimming classes.

"International schools have swimming pools, they have lessons. To fix this (small pool of swimmers), I don’t want to just rely on high-income households to produce swimmers. What about the low-income families?

"I believe that maybe one day our Olympic gold medal winner could be from the young swimmers from lower income families that we are developing now,” she said, adding that she’s mulling introducing the programme at the primary school level.

"I think this can grow our pool of potential talents.”

The third sport of focus is martial arts. Yeoh said Malaysia’s multi-ethnic population is a strength the country can leverage on, citing the number of good Malaysian-Indian karate athletes. Malaysia’s Arif Afifuddin Ab Malik won the gold medal for Malaysia at the Hangzhou Asian Games last year, winning the kumite (brown belt) event for under 84kg.

"Why martial arts? Well, we’re good at it. Silat won us medals. Wushu won us medals and karate too,” she said, referring to both the SEA Games and Asian Games.

"It is a strength of a diverse nation like Malaysia. We should leverage it.”

Limited budget

Still, Yeoh admitted that producing elite-level athletes in these three sports would require much more than generic social programmes. That means more money would have been poured into infrastructures, facilities and world-class trainers, which can be expensive.

The Youth and Sports Ministry received just RM1 billion for its 2024 budget, small relative to what other ministries get. Over 60 per cent of it goes to operating expenditure and just RM460 million to develop programmes and infrastructure.

Yeoh said the programmes she’s rolled out so far are "quick fixes” to develop the new area of sports focus at the grassroots level given the limited budget she has, without tampering with the development plans of fields that are already given emphasis, such as the Road-to-Gold (RTG) programme.

The RTG was among policies that Yeoh approved to "fast-track” development of elite athletes that show potential to win Malaysia’s first Olympic gold medal. One of the programme’s biggest prospects is Sivasangari Subramaniam, the Asian Games squash solo champion.

Budget was also the overriding factor behind the decision to focus on these three sports, Yeoh said. Apart from swimming, facilities for track and field and martial arts are cheaper.

"We have a lot of development for team sports. Yes, they are important and we will continue to give it focus but we need to be realistic — team sports only win us a few medals,” she said.

"So that’s why I say let’s also look at the individual sports, they aren’t expensive. That’s why we are re-shifting our focus.”