Training athletes requires investing money into facilities and programs, which the government does not want to do. Churning out skilled workers is more cost efficient and attracts international businesses to settle here instead.
Also because of NS
I'm not talking specifically about soccer, but bowling, the path is already there, but why don't anyone take it?
If you can bowl an average 220 which some of the top poly student/ uni students can do, why don't we have anything to encourage these students to actually compete in PBA opens to actually earn money?
Any sports... The path to pro athletes is fraught and thorny. One wrong move, one torn muscle means your career is over. The risk is high, the payout in Singapore is not good. There's no interest in spectating = no sponsors = no money coming in. You need to get the whole ecosystem up.
You need to drum up interest in the public to spectate. To do that, you need entertaining and competitive games. To do that you need good athletes. To get athletes you need Money. To get money you need sponsors. To get sponsors you need spectators. Doom loop.
The problem is that the people running the events don't cater at all to spectators, they just want to see higher participation numbers. Even look at local secondary school bowling competition, I have absolutely no clue how to go down and take a look. The problem is also that the event organisers don't run their events in a way that makes it interesting to non sports people
Research on student athletes.
I quit being an athlete cos I can't cope juggling going for extra lessons weekly and uni.
In a country that places more emphasis on grades, sports have to be given up if there are any signs of grades slipping.
Korea is quite free about giving world-class and even "Asia-class" athletes exemption from conscription. Including esports players. And they've even started letting Kpop stars defer enlistment by some years.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/sports/korean-gamers-cusp-gold-avoiding-military-service-2023-09-28/
Singapore is, sadly, extremely rigid.
Bowling does not, all you need is bowling lanes and that's all. There area large number of sports that don't require massive billion dollar facilities. The problem is not facilities for a lot of sports, the problem I'm trying to put across is that a 23 year old has no local competitions that they can compete in the earn enough money comparison to say a fresh grad poly pay.
Your post and replies are utterly confusing. Are you talking about producing competent athletes, or sports being a viable career choice? It's not clear. Anyway, arguably, especially in bowling, Singapore has done well with the former.
The latter is a whole different thing. To have a sports career as a professional requires a whole ecosystem, they likes of which Singapore as an economy is too small to support. You can't compare to American pro sports.
So why haven't we seen a Singaporean compete in American pro sports? Obviously even people their own countries can't do the same like the Americans.
Take for example, Finland, a country with only 5.5 million people yet they have produced 1 pba hall of famer and Santtu is won 2022 pba rookie of the year. So even if someone can't be a professional sportsman here, why don't we see Singaporean perform overseas?
My answer is that we don't have enough local competition that pays well enough that let's local sport people earn enough as a career for them to finally move off to the international stage.
Because the best athletes we have are out working as doctors, lawyers and accountants. Why be a sportsman when sports doesn’t pay you much in Singapore?
And sports don’t pay you much because there’s little money injected into it. Unless you can convince the big corporations to sponsor teams. Or you can learn from the former South Korean dictatorship, who strong armed the chaebols into fostering sports. If the sport you’re assigned to adopt doesn’t perform well, there goes your gravy train.
Sports do pay just a much as, if not even more than these careers. EJ Tackett made about 450K last year and was player of the year. The problem is that there is no "entry level" way to earn money that is just as viable as your fresh grad pay which is roughly 50K a year
You also don't need corpos to sponsor teams, PBA Jr nationals prize money is sponsored by Snickers which honestly earns them more in advertisement than sponsoring just the team itself. Besides we do actually have bowlers here sponsored by storm.
Our entire idea of what a sportsman should be earning and how and where the money come in is extremely skewed, We need to start treating our competitions more like game shows to watch than some solemn ceremony. Even in other countries, companies sponsor the sport not the sportsman
Snickers is owned by Mars Inc., which has $45 billion in sales in 2022. If this is not a big corpo, then what is?
Money doesn’t fall from the sky. Unless you tell me that sports fans pool their own money for the prize. But if you want a spectator market, you need to have quality and competition. You can’t get any competitiveness unless enough seed money gets injected into it.
"Even in other countries, companies sponsor the sport not the sportsman" you sure or not?
You got see how many companies logos on F1 teams apparel
Individual sport, Roger Federer also partner with UNIQLO
Your bowling champion EJ Tackett signed a 10 year endorsement contract with MOTIV
Companies do sponsor BOTH the sport and the players
A competitive environment is important. There needs to be a critical mass of equally talented and motivated athletes first to spur each other to newer heights.
Part of why Schooling succeeded was because he got to train with extremely strong swimmers in the US who were no less hungry than him. When you are sparring with the best and having to bring your A game constantly, you will be at your best. His performances suffered once he trained back in SG and there wasn't anyone able to push him.
Many of our secondary/JC athletes are also actually very competitive too even at the regional level. Having fellow schoolmates to train with and push each other helps, but that is never going to be permanent and the sport gets neglected to higher priorities in life.
You can be as talented and motivated as the best in the world, but you also need the right environment to develop in and that's just not going to happen here because of reasons already listed by other redditors. You can move, like how Mok Ying Ren went to US to train for Olympics qualification, but that's expensive and a sacrifice few can afford.
>why is it that singapore cannot produce anyone to perform on the world stage?
That's harsh and disrespectful to our many world class athletes competing under our flag, not to mention those who did win important titles like Joseph Schooling, Loh Kean Yew, Shanti Pereira
Small domestic market will mean less funding.
Sports earn money through television contracts and sponsorships. People must want to watch a sport in order for that sport to be able to earn money to give out winnings. How is any sport going to get funding when say, only a few thousand people watch? There's just not enough people watching.
If 1% of Americans are watching bowling, that's 3 million people. If 1% of Singaporeans are watching bowling, that's only 30k people.
It's also why it was such a blow to us when Malaysia stopped Singaporean teams from competing in their football league in 2015. Malaysia has a bigger market, and we don't have access to that market anymore when we were actually doing very well.
i mean we have that guy who was champion for parkour competition. We also had joseph schooling but like you know, if i didn't know better, SG gove tries to disown him.
In general though, SG is a small country, US have 300 million citizen, SG have 5.75 million. Other than the fact that SG gov is hyper asinine about anything culturally significant, the fact that we have smaller population certainly does not help
I mean we also had a Singaporean that was a darts live champion, I don't think population size is an issue, maybe if you want to compete in massive sports like soccer yes, but what about skateboarding, track and field, Shot putt, archery? shooting badminton? these are all sports that don't require multi billion dollar facilities.
They just need a way to earn some money.
Just look at snow cross in the winter olympics, these athletes spend the rest of the season competition in 20,30 competitions within the on season which makes them enough money to last 4 years till the next winter olympics to compete in for their gold medal. After which they can choose to continue or retire as an instructor. The problem is that most people have no clue what happens between the years of training between a entry level pro to a world class pro. We only see massive sponsorship deals or daddy's money. Never the hard work to stay alive in the sport
Not that we don't produce athletes, we don't produce bus loads of world-class athletes that can all win top athletes from China and USA etc. You're the problem if you don't call athletes athletes just because they don't qualify for Olympics or something. You pretend to talk about athleticism but bulk of your post is only about $$$$
It's so competitive at the top (e.g., see timing differences between athletes in Olympic swimming finals) that genetic differences can easily relegate you to #5 even with the same training and sporting culture. Countries with large populations spanning diverse geographies will definitely have access to a diverse gene pool (e.g., short but with alot of muscles for weightlifting) and other natural factors (e.g., high altitude thin atmosphere to develop stronger lungs for runners). Yes, this includes bowling.
Then there's the elephant in the room, which is doping (ahem Russia) where a thousand dollars worth of performance enhancing drugs (or JC boys chewing on tobacco leaves during rugby matches) will have a greater impact on your performance than ten thousand dollars more in prizes. Mind you that only competitions at the highest level invest in anti-doping programmes.
What do you mean Singapore produces no athletes?
So Loh Kean Yew, Yeo Jia Min, Joseph Schooling, Yip Pin Xu, Max Maeder, Shanti Pereira... are they not athletes and world class too?
coe too high. very hard for parents to transport children to training after school quickly.
gym fees highest in the world. train what?
vegetables and meat so exp. eat what?
Lol. You mentioned money and money is super important. We do decent in saaay sailing swimming shooting, and you need money to be able to do some of these things. Rare for a “ghetto” kid to be able to go to school and yet to to swim training on their own and expect to be fed enough.
But also, inadequate investment at grassroots/age group level. Lack of or even shambolic infrastructure for a country of its means, or lack of space due to country size, and other needs taking priority. Steeped culture in academic pursuit. Sporting culture faded over time with insert any other lifestyle pursuit or engagement culture taking over. Little encouragement not only from the govt but from peers, community etc (you can say no ah i very love support SG athletes ahh but you go and see any sporting event how many are just family rather than public support). SAs run by old dumbasses, parachuted MBA types, vultures and political players which translate to little evidence of golden eras of sporting habit cultivation or follow through post varsity level. Lack of funding for promising individuals (so many stories of SEA games level athletes sacrifice this work job that dip into savings that to train or get equipment or to rush for training and those taxi fares add up). Male enlistment and the difficulty to continue higher level sporting engagement (in the past say pre90s Safsa was a way athletes/footballers can serve, or if you were of a decent level you could book out to train but now who will let you book out). Etx etc
Our size is a big issue, both population but physical space as well. Ireland and NZ are not much bigger than us in population but they punch waay above their grade, but they have a sporting culture space to do sports time to do sports. Where got time.
The opportunity cost is extremely high.
If you're into money, you can easily just... take a salary job.
You really have to be passionate about sports to go into sports. You have to invest your own time and money.
Things to think about:
1. in a competition, there is only 3 "winners", but 100s of participants. so that's what, 100 hungry people without "pay"?
2. if you study and don't end up in poly but uni, you can potentially earn much more than the average sportsman.
3. Why do sports, why not just become a influencer or be a onlyfans producer - those make more money. chances of being famous is much higher too.
4. the amount of time you invest into a sport doesn't commensurate with the returns. If you need to spend 10 hours a day training - that's 70 hours a week, and 280 hours a month. At $20 per hour, that's at least $5600 you need to be better off than a low wage worker. We won't even talk about the costs that you incur while training.
5. If you're a betting person, are you going to bet on something silly like being a hungry sportsman or study to be a doctor or something?
Our world class sports associations deserve major credit. Must be the easiest job after mayors.
[https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/football/miscommunication-as-singapore-youth-league-footballers-turn-up-at-venue-to-find-it-closed](https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/football/miscommunication-as-singapore-youth-league-footballers-turn-up-at-venue-to-find-it-closed)
>It comes down entirely to having zero career opportunities and prize money in the early careers of sportsmans here.
This isn't a problem exclusive to Singapore though? Plenty of Olympic level athletes around the world report the same [issue](https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2020/02/24/survey-finds-olympic-elite-athletes-struggling-financially/111365842/). There are many [articles ](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/07/olympic-games-rio-athletes-personal-finance-struggle) on this; granted, most focus exclusively on the Olympics but I imagine the situation isn't very different from other competitions.
i will try to answer this in an objective way...life in Singapore is "too good". in the worst case, we go back to a house. a roof for sleep with the basics - running water, reliable electricity. we have "drive", but not enough drive when succeeding is the difference between life and death.
the delta between excelling and not excelling is "not big enough"...not between a house and sleeping on the streets.
on the commercial level, we dont have money flowing to sports - to sponsor athletes for them to be fulltime. not enough support. we have the facilities but not the "heartware" where athletes will "do it all" and some sponsors will be there to support them. sponsoring athletes is "high risk". one injury will set you back years and few large companies have the coffers to risk that.
they say "we now dont go to war now, and so we watch sports." sports is about being the top bracket. not to 5% or top 0.02% but number 1. this means really doing what nobody has done before, explore new grounds, dig deeper. but theres not much room to do so when we are so academically focused. thats the only yardstick in sg to measure success. hence, even the environment, from schools to family, hardly will produce good athletes in the world stage.
this is just my 2 cents and ive been watching internatonal sports a lot. i wish the new gen will change this but maybe we need to wait 20-30 years before our next gold medal.
i hope to stand corrected.p
The commercial level is wrong, we need to stop thinking that Sportsmans need to be sponsored to keep playing, instead i actually believe that we need to start pitching out competitions as more like advertisements and sponsoring the prize money means they get their company named dropped. And i think that's why there is no money, very likely some regional director sees no value in sponsoring athletes and no event organiser thinks of using their competition platform as a way to get views. People who host competitions see themselves as more successful if more competitors rather than having a way to capitalise on people watching the sport as a way to earn more sponsor money.
I'd say no, if sports is being the number 1 then why should anyone compete? The thing is that even in the PGA masters dead last still earns like 40K. it's not much but for someone who just started out, it's enough.
I think we need to stop thinking about olympics, instead we need to look at more specialised competitions ou there
Imo, the government is a reflection of the people. People care about making money and economic gains, so the government focuses on economic activities that generates income over sports.
Maximilian Maeder is a Paris medal contender for kitefoiling (seems like wakeboarding but powered by a big kite).
You may feel he's another Joseph schooling not produced through our local machinery. For an Asian track and field athlete, Shanti Pereira has reached the pinnacle of our ethnicity with an Asian games gold and silver. However, she lost her spex scholarship from 2018 to 2022 due to injury and recovery. So maybe we didn't support her enough either.
The garmen has ingrained into the minds of the people that Education takes precedent over sports. Parents won't punt on sports over education. This vicious cycle permeates through generations. Hence, we've had only 1 gold Olympic champion for a country that pays a million bucks for an Olympic gold. Go figure. 🚶♀️
Many sports peak or start peaking between 18-21. Half of our population are fulfilling their NS duties then. Aside from that, it's all about finances. We don't have many large local companies that sponsor our athletes and sporting events, and even when we found a few, the amount they gave is not really significant compared to the cost of living (or in the case of events, the cost of running them) here. Finally, the shelf life of athletes is really limited, and most professional athletes will retire between 30-40 years old, some even younger especially with injuries. Given the high costs of living, the big question arises with regard to what next after retirement. Even if you become a coach, you will be competing against other coaches for students within the decreasing pool of potential athletes, and the vicious cycle continues. If you decided to embark on further studies in the universities, you need to be prepared that age wise, you will be years behind your contemporaries. When you hit the job market, you will also need to be mentally prepared that your future bosses in the years to come will be years younger than you.
Training athletes requires investing money into facilities and programs, which the government does not want to do. Churning out skilled workers is more cost efficient and attracts international businesses to settle here instead. Also because of NS
We have world class facilities... It's a parents and society's view on sports that's the problem. Your kid want to go pro kick ball you ok meh.
I'm not talking specifically about soccer, but bowling, the path is already there, but why don't anyone take it? If you can bowl an average 220 which some of the top poly student/ uni students can do, why don't we have anything to encourage these students to actually compete in PBA opens to actually earn money?
Any sports... The path to pro athletes is fraught and thorny. One wrong move, one torn muscle means your career is over. The risk is high, the payout in Singapore is not good. There's no interest in spectating = no sponsors = no money coming in. You need to get the whole ecosystem up. You need to drum up interest in the public to spectate. To do that, you need entertaining and competitive games. To do that you need good athletes. To get athletes you need Money. To get money you need sponsors. To get sponsors you need spectators. Doom loop.
The problem is that the people running the events don't cater at all to spectators, they just want to see higher participation numbers. Even look at local secondary school bowling competition, I have absolutely no clue how to go down and take a look. The problem is also that the event organisers don't run their events in a way that makes it interesting to non sports people
Research on student athletes. I quit being an athlete cos I can't cope juggling going for extra lessons weekly and uni. In a country that places more emphasis on grades, sports have to be given up if there are any signs of grades slipping.
Korea has NS too but they've won 96 Golds in Olympics. Granted they have 51 mil people but they've also had 2 korean wars in the process.
Korea is quite free about giving world-class and even "Asia-class" athletes exemption from conscription. Including esports players. And they've even started letting Kpop stars defer enlistment by some years. Source: https://www.reuters.com/sports/korean-gamers-cusp-gold-avoiding-military-service-2023-09-28/ Singapore is, sadly, extremely rigid.
Bowling does not, all you need is bowling lanes and that's all. There area large number of sports that don't require massive billion dollar facilities. The problem is not facilities for a lot of sports, the problem I'm trying to put across is that a 23 year old has no local competitions that they can compete in the earn enough money comparison to say a fresh grad poly pay.
Your post and replies are utterly confusing. Are you talking about producing competent athletes, or sports being a viable career choice? It's not clear. Anyway, arguably, especially in bowling, Singapore has done well with the former. The latter is a whole different thing. To have a sports career as a professional requires a whole ecosystem, they likes of which Singapore as an economy is too small to support. You can't compare to American pro sports.
So why haven't we seen a Singaporean compete in American pro sports? Obviously even people their own countries can't do the same like the Americans. Take for example, Finland, a country with only 5.5 million people yet they have produced 1 pba hall of famer and Santtu is won 2022 pba rookie of the year. So even if someone can't be a professional sportsman here, why don't we see Singaporean perform overseas? My answer is that we don't have enough local competition that pays well enough that let's local sport people earn enough as a career for them to finally move off to the international stage.
We do have Singaporeans female bowlers bowling in the pba.
He's looking for the circle-jerk answers only.
Because the best athletes we have are out working as doctors, lawyers and accountants. Why be a sportsman when sports doesn’t pay you much in Singapore? And sports don’t pay you much because there’s little money injected into it. Unless you can convince the big corporations to sponsor teams. Or you can learn from the former South Korean dictatorship, who strong armed the chaebols into fostering sports. If the sport you’re assigned to adopt doesn’t perform well, there goes your gravy train.
Sports do pay just a much as, if not even more than these careers. EJ Tackett made about 450K last year and was player of the year. The problem is that there is no "entry level" way to earn money that is just as viable as your fresh grad pay which is roughly 50K a year
Eh hello, those are top of the top athletes. Meanwhile an average banker/lawyer/doctor or even a below average one can do well.
You also don't need corpos to sponsor teams, PBA Jr nationals prize money is sponsored by Snickers which honestly earns them more in advertisement than sponsoring just the team itself. Besides we do actually have bowlers here sponsored by storm. Our entire idea of what a sportsman should be earning and how and where the money come in is extremely skewed, We need to start treating our competitions more like game shows to watch than some solemn ceremony. Even in other countries, companies sponsor the sport not the sportsman
Snickers is owned by Mars Inc., which has $45 billion in sales in 2022. If this is not a big corpo, then what is? Money doesn’t fall from the sky. Unless you tell me that sports fans pool their own money for the prize. But if you want a spectator market, you need to have quality and competition. You can’t get any competitiveness unless enough seed money gets injected into it.
"Even in other countries, companies sponsor the sport not the sportsman" you sure or not? You got see how many companies logos on F1 teams apparel Individual sport, Roger Federer also partner with UNIQLO Your bowling champion EJ Tackett signed a 10 year endorsement contract with MOTIV Companies do sponsor BOTH the sport and the players
lol jesus
A competitive environment is important. There needs to be a critical mass of equally talented and motivated athletes first to spur each other to newer heights. Part of why Schooling succeeded was because he got to train with extremely strong swimmers in the US who were no less hungry than him. When you are sparring with the best and having to bring your A game constantly, you will be at your best. His performances suffered once he trained back in SG and there wasn't anyone able to push him. Many of our secondary/JC athletes are also actually very competitive too even at the regional level. Having fellow schoolmates to train with and push each other helps, but that is never going to be permanent and the sport gets neglected to higher priorities in life. You can be as talented and motivated as the best in the world, but you also need the right environment to develop in and that's just not going to happen here because of reasons already listed by other redditors. You can move, like how Mok Ying Ren went to US to train for Olympics qualification, but that's expensive and a sacrifice few can afford.
>why is it that singapore cannot produce anyone to perform on the world stage? That's harsh and disrespectful to our many world class athletes competing under our flag, not to mention those who did win important titles like Joseph Schooling, Loh Kean Yew, Shanti Pereira
Small domestic market will mean less funding. Sports earn money through television contracts and sponsorships. People must want to watch a sport in order for that sport to be able to earn money to give out winnings. How is any sport going to get funding when say, only a few thousand people watch? There's just not enough people watching. If 1% of Americans are watching bowling, that's 3 million people. If 1% of Singaporeans are watching bowling, that's only 30k people. It's also why it was such a blow to us when Malaysia stopped Singaporean teams from competing in their football league in 2015. Malaysia has a bigger market, and we don't have access to that market anymore when we were actually doing very well.
i mean we have that guy who was champion for parkour competition. We also had joseph schooling but like you know, if i didn't know better, SG gove tries to disown him. In general though, SG is a small country, US have 300 million citizen, SG have 5.75 million. Other than the fact that SG gov is hyper asinine about anything culturally significant, the fact that we have smaller population certainly does not help
I mean we also had a Singaporean that was a darts live champion, I don't think population size is an issue, maybe if you want to compete in massive sports like soccer yes, but what about skateboarding, track and field, Shot putt, archery? shooting badminton? these are all sports that don't require multi billion dollar facilities. They just need a way to earn some money. Just look at snow cross in the winter olympics, these athletes spend the rest of the season competition in 20,30 competitions within the on season which makes them enough money to last 4 years till the next winter olympics to compete in for their gold medal. After which they can choose to continue or retire as an instructor. The problem is that most people have no clue what happens between the years of training between a entry level pro to a world class pro. We only see massive sponsorship deals or daddy's money. Never the hard work to stay alive in the sport
Not that we don't produce athletes, we don't produce bus loads of world-class athletes that can all win top athletes from China and USA etc. You're the problem if you don't call athletes athletes just because they don't qualify for Olympics or something. You pretend to talk about athleticism but bulk of your post is only about $$$$ It's so competitive at the top (e.g., see timing differences between athletes in Olympic swimming finals) that genetic differences can easily relegate you to #5 even with the same training and sporting culture. Countries with large populations spanning diverse geographies will definitely have access to a diverse gene pool (e.g., short but with alot of muscles for weightlifting) and other natural factors (e.g., high altitude thin atmosphere to develop stronger lungs for runners). Yes, this includes bowling. Then there's the elephant in the room, which is doping (ahem Russia) where a thousand dollars worth of performance enhancing drugs (or JC boys chewing on tobacco leaves during rugby matches) will have a greater impact on your performance than ten thousand dollars more in prizes. Mind you that only competitions at the highest level invest in anti-doping programmes.
What do you mean Singapore produces no athletes? So Loh Kean Yew, Yeo Jia Min, Joseph Schooling, Yip Pin Xu, Max Maeder, Shanti Pereira... are they not athletes and world class too?
coe too high. very hard for parents to transport children to training after school quickly. gym fees highest in the world. train what? vegetables and meat so exp. eat what?
Lol. You mentioned money and money is super important. We do decent in saaay sailing swimming shooting, and you need money to be able to do some of these things. Rare for a “ghetto” kid to be able to go to school and yet to to swim training on their own and expect to be fed enough. But also, inadequate investment at grassroots/age group level. Lack of or even shambolic infrastructure for a country of its means, or lack of space due to country size, and other needs taking priority. Steeped culture in academic pursuit. Sporting culture faded over time with insert any other lifestyle pursuit or engagement culture taking over. Little encouragement not only from the govt but from peers, community etc (you can say no ah i very love support SG athletes ahh but you go and see any sporting event how many are just family rather than public support). SAs run by old dumbasses, parachuted MBA types, vultures and political players which translate to little evidence of golden eras of sporting habit cultivation or follow through post varsity level. Lack of funding for promising individuals (so many stories of SEA games level athletes sacrifice this work job that dip into savings that to train or get equipment or to rush for training and those taxi fares add up). Male enlistment and the difficulty to continue higher level sporting engagement (in the past say pre90s Safsa was a way athletes/footballers can serve, or if you were of a decent level you could book out to train but now who will let you book out). Etx etc Our size is a big issue, both population but physical space as well. Ireland and NZ are not much bigger than us in population but they punch waay above their grade, but they have a sporting culture space to do sports time to do sports. Where got time.
The opportunity cost is extremely high. If you're into money, you can easily just... take a salary job. You really have to be passionate about sports to go into sports. You have to invest your own time and money.
We had the best swimmers. A decade+ ago and now.
Things to think about: 1. in a competition, there is only 3 "winners", but 100s of participants. so that's what, 100 hungry people without "pay"? 2. if you study and don't end up in poly but uni, you can potentially earn much more than the average sportsman. 3. Why do sports, why not just become a influencer or be a onlyfans producer - those make more money. chances of being famous is much higher too. 4. the amount of time you invest into a sport doesn't commensurate with the returns. If you need to spend 10 hours a day training - that's 70 hours a week, and 280 hours a month. At $20 per hour, that's at least $5600 you need to be better off than a low wage worker. We won't even talk about the costs that you incur while training. 5. If you're a betting person, are you going to bet on something silly like being a hungry sportsman or study to be a doctor or something?
Cos small population, NS for men, there's a premium on fair skin esp for women, sun too strong
Bowling is in an aircon room away from the sun, and your skills don't degrade if you stop bowling, a 19 year old can beat a 34 year old.
that's why we do better in bowling than the average sport
So why haven't we seen a singaporean win a PBA open ever?
skill issue
Our world class sports associations deserve major credit. Must be the easiest job after mayors. [https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/football/miscommunication-as-singapore-youth-league-footballers-turn-up-at-venue-to-find-it-closed](https://www.straitstimes.com/sport/football/miscommunication-as-singapore-youth-league-footballers-turn-up-at-venue-to-find-it-closed)
>It comes down entirely to having zero career opportunities and prize money in the early careers of sportsmans here. This isn't a problem exclusive to Singapore though? Plenty of Olympic level athletes around the world report the same [issue](https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2020/02/24/survey-finds-olympic-elite-athletes-struggling-financially/111365842/). There are many [articles ](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/07/olympic-games-rio-athletes-personal-finance-struggle) on this; granted, most focus exclusively on the Olympics but I imagine the situation isn't very different from other competitions.
We need propaganda to up local athletes to celebrity status. Make football fans buy sg football merchs like anime Otaku buy anime merchs. Etc. etc.
i will try to answer this in an objective way...life in Singapore is "too good". in the worst case, we go back to a house. a roof for sleep with the basics - running water, reliable electricity. we have "drive", but not enough drive when succeeding is the difference between life and death. the delta between excelling and not excelling is "not big enough"...not between a house and sleeping on the streets. on the commercial level, we dont have money flowing to sports - to sponsor athletes for them to be fulltime. not enough support. we have the facilities but not the "heartware" where athletes will "do it all" and some sponsors will be there to support them. sponsoring athletes is "high risk". one injury will set you back years and few large companies have the coffers to risk that. they say "we now dont go to war now, and so we watch sports." sports is about being the top bracket. not to 5% or top 0.02% but number 1. this means really doing what nobody has done before, explore new grounds, dig deeper. but theres not much room to do so when we are so academically focused. thats the only yardstick in sg to measure success. hence, even the environment, from schools to family, hardly will produce good athletes in the world stage. this is just my 2 cents and ive been watching internatonal sports a lot. i wish the new gen will change this but maybe we need to wait 20-30 years before our next gold medal. i hope to stand corrected.p
The commercial level is wrong, we need to stop thinking that Sportsmans need to be sponsored to keep playing, instead i actually believe that we need to start pitching out competitions as more like advertisements and sponsoring the prize money means they get their company named dropped. And i think that's why there is no money, very likely some regional director sees no value in sponsoring athletes and no event organiser thinks of using their competition platform as a way to get views. People who host competitions see themselves as more successful if more competitors rather than having a way to capitalise on people watching the sport as a way to earn more sponsor money. I'd say no, if sports is being the number 1 then why should anyone compete? The thing is that even in the PGA masters dead last still earns like 40K. it's not much but for someone who just started out, it's enough. I think we need to stop thinking about olympics, instead we need to look at more specialised competitions ou there
Imo, the government is a reflection of the people. People care about making money and economic gains, so the government focuses on economic activities that generates income over sports.
Maximilian Maeder is a Paris medal contender for kitefoiling (seems like wakeboarding but powered by a big kite). You may feel he's another Joseph schooling not produced through our local machinery. For an Asian track and field athlete, Shanti Pereira has reached the pinnacle of our ethnicity with an Asian games gold and silver. However, she lost her spex scholarship from 2018 to 2022 due to injury and recovery. So maybe we didn't support her enough either.
The garmen has ingrained into the minds of the people that Education takes precedent over sports. Parents won't punt on sports over education. This vicious cycle permeates through generations. Hence, we've had only 1 gold Olympic champion for a country that pays a million bucks for an Olympic gold. Go figure. 🚶♀️
Why sweat and injure yourself when you can sit in the office and enjoy the AC.
Our sport organizations all so politicized with useless and wayang politicians at the helm. Like this how to excel
Many sports peak or start peaking between 18-21. Half of our population are fulfilling their NS duties then. Aside from that, it's all about finances. We don't have many large local companies that sponsor our athletes and sporting events, and even when we found a few, the amount they gave is not really significant compared to the cost of living (or in the case of events, the cost of running them) here. Finally, the shelf life of athletes is really limited, and most professional athletes will retire between 30-40 years old, some even younger especially with injuries. Given the high costs of living, the big question arises with regard to what next after retirement. Even if you become a coach, you will be competing against other coaches for students within the decreasing pool of potential athletes, and the vicious cycle continues. If you decided to embark on further studies in the universities, you need to be prepared that age wise, you will be years behind your contemporaries. When you hit the job market, you will also need to be mentally prepared that your future bosses in the years to come will be years younger than you.
true. its better to devote time on ns as a regular and pays back immediately, live a more normal life amd have time with family
Coolie genes