MP SPEAKS | I have a feeling the story of sports in Malaysia is incomplete. Or at least it was not told in its whole.

My minister and I came to the helm of the Youth and Sports Ministry in July 2018 on the heels of a disappointing performance in the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia. Our Malaysian contingent failed to meet the top 10 finish target set earlier.

If our story of sports only ends at the podium, it is easy to blame individual athletes or coaches or even the government for failures at competitions.

Yet in the past eight months, I have come to learn more and more about this amazing story of sports, the diverse characters within, as well as the incredible feats they performed.

Think about Dr Yeo Wee Kian, in-house scientist of Institut Sukan Negara (ISN), who has been working on cutting-edge research on metabolic syndrome and healthy ageing from studying how to improve athletes’ performance in the field. Some potentials in Yeo’s work include exercise and associated strategies to alleviate conditions such as insulin resistance, diabetes and perhaps even cancer.

Or Dr Rebecca Wong, our head shrink at ISN. She designed a method to assess the level of mental focus in athletes. Through a simple assessment, she will be able to advise athletes and coaches if an athlete is in his or her optimal focus for an upcoming tournament. I am amazed how she innovated and employed marriage therapy to work on building better relationship and communication between our national badminton mixed doubles Chan Peng Soon-Goh Liu Ying, who eventually won us a silver medal in the 2016 Olympic Games. Breakthroughs from this adaptation can in turn improve on existing marriage therapy.

Our biomechanical engineer, Yuvaraj, who recently completed his postgraduate dissertation in Universiti Malaya, had successfully identified with scientific calculation, factors which produce the most effective “smash” by a badminton player. Work such as his and his team to understand biomechanics - how human bones, muscles, ligaments and tendons work together - to optimise the movements of our athletes can eventually contribute to enhancing mobility in the aged or even persons with disability.

The nutritionists who assist athletes in their weight adjustment programmes, use advanced scientific methods to produce the desired weight gain or weight loss without adversely affecting overall health, especially muscles condition. Think about the potential of such a programme in a country where half of our population is overweight or obese due to poor understanding of nutrition. 

I do not see why agencies such as ISN cannot work with the vast network of government health facilities all over the country to provide a free or low-cost weight management programme to the general public.

The team of doctors and therapists including Faezah, the head physiotherapist, who work quietly behind our sports stars, are constantly exploring the best recovery methods for our injured and battle-worn athletes. Their work definitely helps us to understand the human healing process better and is extremely useful to advance medical science in general.

The technologists behind our athletes aiming at improving performance through cutting-edge research and development eventually produced technology for general consumption outside of sports. Think about the advanced engine oil Petronas has invented because of the company’s involvement in F1.

The Youth and Sports Ministry has always received one of the lowest allocations whether in the previous government or the new government. I believe one of the reasons for this is the incomplete story of sports we have been telling. If sports is merely Olympic gold medals, the public may not be excited to increase spending of their tax money.

The Ministry of Youth and Sports wants to tell the story of sports differently from now on. Yes, there are always the intangible values of sports - it is a unifying platform, especially for a diverse society such as ours - but we also want to advertise the tangible, and quantifiable outcome of our investment in sports.

If the ministry can show that for every ringgit spent on sports, we can reduce our hospital bill by X percent or decrease spending on prisons; if we can show that all the work put into creating an Olympian can eventually benefit society at large - from diabetes and cancer research to enhancing mobility to mental resilience and much more; if we can tell the full story of sports, I believe it will not only create greater interest in sports, but it will also revolutionise the way we think about and do sports in the future.

STEVEN SIM IS MP for Bukit Mertajam and Deputy Minister of Youth and Sports.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.