Sorting the creme de la creme from plain old skimmed milk in Road to Gold

MARGINAL gains, process losses.

These terms sounded foreign to sports journalists in Malaysia, until they were used by the then Youth and Sports Minister, Khairy Jamaluddin, when he unveiled the New Sports Model in February 2015.

So when Olympic Council of Malaysia (OCM) president, Tan Sri Mohamad Norza Zakaria, uttered these two sports jargons during a media conference announcing the Road to Gold project co-chaired by him and the present Youth and Sports Minister, Hannah Yeoh on Sunday, my mind harked back to Khairy’s thumping speech all those years ago.

Following a Review on the High Performance System in Malaysia led by Dr Brian Miller of the Western Australian Institute of Sports (WAIS), Khairy introduced a governance model which provided the National Sports Institute (NSI) a bigger role to play in producing champions on the world stage.

Central to the new structure was the Podium Programme, which was supposed to be a province of the elite, the cream of the crop among Malaysian athletes.

But Khairy, who understands the political dynamics of Malaysian sports, stopped short of promising the gold at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016.

The transformation, he said, would only churn out the desired outcome in the Tokyo edition.

We know what happened in the intervening years.

Four Ministers have taken turns to succeed Khairy since then.

The Tokyo Olympics was postponed to 2021, held under strict health protocols following the Covid-19 pandemic.

Track cyclist Datuk Azizulhasni Awang missed the gold in his pet event keirin by a distance, after Britain’s Jason Kenny earned a comfortable victory following an early sprint tactic that took everyone by surprise.

Azizul returned home with the silver, after edging world champion Harrie Lavreysen of Holland.

The incumbent of the hotseat once occupied by Khairy is now Hannah, who has introduced the Road to Gold project, less than 500 days from the Paris Games.

Her committee have been entrusted to produce Malaysia’s first ever gold medal at the Olympics, which has eluded the contingent in 16 previous appearances since Melbourne 1956.

The project coordinator handpicked by Hannah is Malaysia Football League (MFL) chief executive officer Stuart Ramalingam.

Since he was made the general secretary of the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) in 2018, two days after Datuk Hamidin Mohd Amin was elected into the presidency, Stuart has survived the football cesspool.

While good narrative and in-depth and well-thought strategies rarely pay off these days, Stuart is fully aware how powerful optics management is. He was, after all, the head of the secretariat of FAM, everyone’s favourite punching bag and Malaysia’s most convenient scapegoat.

With his background as a successful commercial strategist, Stuart is expected to entice our corporate captains to invest into the project. Time is of the essence for a programme that hitherto had been heavily reliant on the annual Federal budget.

Stuart will be ably assisted by another administrator who earned her stripes in football via the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), Michelle Chai, now chief executive at the Badminton Academy of Malaysia.

The only downside is that both will have to juggle between their core duties at their high-profile organisations and the pressure of having to separate the wheat from the chaff ahead of the Games.

They need to sort the creme de la creme from plain old skimmed milk, through an in-depth study of the rankings in world badminton, diving and cycling.

They have to intensify the sports science support system in order to register the marginal gains, much like the way the Government invested as much as RM13mil into the research and development behind the bike Azizulhasni rode in Tokyo, valued at RM300,000.

Investment from the corporate sector, over and above the 2023 Budget currently debated in Parliament, would allow the Committee to increase the monthly allowance as requested by two-time medallist, Datuk Pandelela Rinong.

The gold in Paris has become a must for the committee. For sure the next Sports Minister will have other plans for Los Angeles 2028.