Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song (Aljunied): Madam, I declare my interest as a parent of a child in a high performance sports programme run by SportSG. I congratulate Yeo Jia Min and Loh Kean Yew on their stellar performance in the recent German Open Badminton tournament. They and other team Singapore athletes have blazed a trail for many more athletes to follow.
The level of competition in world-class sport is fierce, with elite athletes dedicating their youth to training and competing. Winning at the highest level requires early talent identification, top-tier coaching and strong athlete support. These student athletes take a different path from their peers in mainstream schools. Training 20 hours to 30 hours a week and travelling frequently for competitions while studying, is extremely demanding.
Not all can enrol in a Singapore Sports School, because its 10 academy programmes may not match the athlete’s sport. SportSG and National Sports Associations (NSAs) must work more closely with mainstream schools, therefore, to give student athletes greater flexibility in their schedules, while ensuring they keep up academically. Finances are a major hurdle to developing world-class athletes. Most costs, especially in the early years, fall on parents. Joseph Schooling’s parents reportedly spend some $1 million on his training, education, accommodation and travel on his road to winning an Olympic Gold medal. How many families can afford that? Without external funding, we risk limiting our talent pool to the wealthiest households.
Funding need not come solely from the Government. Corporate and private sponsors can help. SportSG and NSA should play a bigger role in securing and connecting athletes with sponsorship opportunities. Even modest sponsorship of equipment, clothing or travel, can help to develop potential talent.
Young athletes and their parents need clearer guidance and structured pathways, so they do not navigate the system alone. More support should be provided to help parents make informed decisions about their child’s sporting and academic future. Smaller NSAs may lack the expertise and resources for world-class coaching and athlete development. In such cases, SportSG should provide more guidance and oversight to support athletes and help them to achieve their full potential.
World-class athletes are developed through years of rigorous training, not talent alone. If we are serious about competing on a world stage, we must put in the right structures, pathways and financing in place for our athletes to train, develop and win.
The Minister for Culture, Community and Youth (Mr Edwin Tong Chun Fai): Let me turn to the second point on sports. Mr Gerald Giam can be assured that we have and we will continue to strengthen our quality high-performance sporting ecosystem, for Singapore athletes. Mr Giam spoke of structures and pathways. So, let me elaborate on structures and pathways that we have previously put in place and which we will continue to put in place.
Madam, we might have a small population base, but we are committed to a system which can identify the best of them and bring out the best in them. We know that being a full-time athlete in Singapore can sometimes be tough, balancing intense training with competition schedules, often overseas and at the same time, the athlete having to meet other life priorities, often requiring sacrifices to be made. But it is also rewarding and fulfilling and many of our athletes strive to reach their peak of their potential.
That is why, over the years, we have reshaped and refined our sporting policies and programmes to help mitigate, minimise, if not, remove these trade-offs, enabling our athletes to develop, to train, to compete and to flourish, at the highest levels.
We start when they are young. We tap into the sports co-curricular activities in mainstream schools, starting with primary schools, which are often our youths’ first exposure to sports. We cast the net wide, to identify as much talent as possible at a young age. That answers Mr Giam’s point, which I agree with, that we should start when the athletes are young.
We also do it through ActiveSG Academies and Clubs, which SportsSG manages, where we first identify, and then nurture young athletes across a wide range of sports, ensuring a healthy and regular pipeline of talent. And for those who have set their minds on sport from a school age, we have the Singapore Sports School that provides a dedicated specialist environment to support both education and training. We have also made this available to high-performance athletes regardless of the school that they are studying in. So, you might be in a different school, but you can come into Sports School for a period or for a season to train for a programme and go back to your original school thereafter.
We have also put in place a comprehensive sport science and medicine program through the National Youth Sports Institute (NYSI) and Singapore Sport Institute (SSI). Ensuring our athletes can manage both the pressures as well as the physicality of high performance sport.
For those who may have reached the crossroads between sports and some other career, we have significantly enhanced our athlete support policies, for instance, to name a few, we went upstream to support athletes with performance potential beyond the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games and welcomed the first batch of spexPotential athletes in April 2024.
We also launched the spexEducation Undergraduate scholarship, gave CPF top-ups to our spexScholars both in August 2024. [Please refer to “Clarification by Minister for Culture, Community and Youth“, Official Report, 10 March 2025, Vol 95, Issue 161, Correction By Written Statement section.] These are changes that help to prolong the livelihood and the period of competition at the highest level for our athletes. And they are the latest in our series of efforts that we have made to strengthen high-performance sport in Singapore.
Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song: Sir, I thank the Minister for responding to my cut. Just two clarifications.
First is, even with top coaching and facilities, our athletes may still lack a strong local training and competitive environment. This is because Singapore’s small population and even smaller pool of young athletes aiming for world-class success limits their chances to train with equally driven peers. One solution obviously is to train overseas. But this is not feasible for most families, especially those from lower- and middle-income groups. So, how is SportSG tackling this challenge beyond just financial support by building a stronger local training and competition environment across all sports?
Second, there are currently only 10 academy programme sports at the Singapore Sports School. With the school’s move to the Kallang campus, are there plans to increase the number of academy programme sports?
Mr Edwin Tong Chun Fai: Sir, Mr Giam is right. We do want to push our athletes beyond the local sphere, and those who surpass the standards that are being offered locally, we want to push them overseas, because the more you push them into difficult environments where they have to level up, meet better opponents, stronger opponents, the better prepared they will be. So, our principle has always been to drive our athletes to train and if necessary, compete overseas as much as possible.
Earlier on in his speech, Mr Giam mentioned two of our badminton players. They train overseas regularly. They compete overseas regularly. In fact, they are still on the road after the German Open. So, these are some examples. At the middle tier, what we do is to organise training trips overseas where possible. We group them together, whether as an NSA-initiated exercise or in some cases where ActiveSG has academies, we group them together as academy-initiated exercise. But we try and take the initiative to take them overseas for greater exposure.
In other cases, on occasion, we bring in foreign coaches to lend their expertise on local soil. That allows us to have more outreach, and we touch more trainees and more athletes can benefit from the presence of foreign coaches. Again, from time to time, NSAs, when they identify a good foreign coach to come in, either at the developmental level or at the high-performance level, we also support the NSAs to hire these coaches to bring even bigger impact to the pipeline. So, these are among some of the measures that we take to expose our athletes, the junior ones as well as the senior ones, to a greater variety of different training environments, as well as to foreign input and foreign thinking on the sport.
I talked about the Kallang Alive Masterplan. As we move closer towards that, we will also have residential facilities at the Kallang Alive space, where the Sports School will sit together with our training centres, and the intention is not just to bring foreign coaches to come in and train with us, but also foreign teams to come in, site in Singapore and spar with us on a more regular basis. All of these would help to level up the playing field and expose our athletes to greater competition.
That leads me to the Member’s second question. We currently have limitations in terms of space, given the programmes, some of which Mr Giam is aware of. But when we have the Sports School at the Kallang Alive Masterplan space ready, redeveloped, we intend to expand beyond 10 programmes, and we are currently studying which of our top-tier sports ought to train in this space, having regard to performance, pipeline and other criteria for each of the sports.
Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth
10 March 2025
https://sprs.parl.gov.sg/search/#/sprs3topic?reportid=budget-2639
Office of the Leader of the Opposition 