KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 1 — The Youth and Sports Ministry is determined to overcome political and leadership crises in several sports associations, including the National Sports Council (NSC), said its Minister Khairy Jamaludin (picture).

He gave an assurance that the issue will be tackled from time to time to ensure it doesn’t continue to affect the performance of sports in the country.

“Through the Sports Commissioner who has the powers under the Sports Development Act, we will continue to engage and identify problems in sports associations.

“We admit there are several sports associations that have politicking, internal conflicts for posts and other issues. There are some whose registration was cancelled and we need to come up with a new association. We will take all this into consideration,” he said in reply to a supplementary question from Senator Datuk Boon Som Inong in the Dewan Negara today.

Boon had asked about the government’s measures to resolve leadership and political crisis within sports associations since it has affected performance and results.

Khairy said the Sports Commissioner will also be reminded not to wait for a crisis to crop up in an association before action was taken.

“We are not interfering, but we will always advise and give advice and draw guidelines to find a solution.

“We don’t want individuals who are too obsessed with posts in associations as the objective is to improve the quality of sports in the country because that is far more important,” he said.

Answering the original question from Senator Roslin Abdul Rahman on steps by the ministry to boost the performance of national athletes, Khairy said the ministry carried out various programmes to identify new talent at the national and regional levels.

Khairy said 5,582 athletes were undergoing training under 44 foreign coaches and 112 local coaches at 252 training centres nationwide.

“From this number, 47 elite athletes were absorbed for training in the 2016 Rio Olympics programme which is targeted to win the country’s first-ever gold medal,” he said.

The ministry will also co-operate with the Education Ministry through the Talent Identification Programme (TIP) which conducts a Level 1 screening test on students nationwide to gauge their performance.

The test is carried out based on 11 types of sports, and 12,551 were tested from January to June this year in terms of their body size and speed, of whom 2,511 were identified to have the potential to become future national athletes.

“The ministry has also embarked on programmes to produce local coaches through the National Coaching Academy, whereby 1,078 Level One coaches are being trained so far,” he added. — Bernama