KUALA LUMPUR: This month marks two years of Hannah Yeoh being at the helm of the Youth and Sports Ministry.
Yeoh, who was a surprise pick for the minister job, said her team has faced numerous challenges so far but are determined to continue improving the development of sports in Malaysia both at the high performance as well as the recreational level.
"It has been a challenging journey so far. We faced challenges at the Phnom Penh Sea Games, Hangzhou Asian Games and then the Paris Olympics," said Yeoh yesterday.
"There have also been many challenges managing the performance of sports (overall), this includes in terms of budgets as well as (managing) athletes and coaches.
"At the same, we have also worked hard on enlarging the talent development pool despite having limited resources.
"Previously, only football, hockey, netball and rugby had (elite junior) development programmes directly under the National Sports Council (NSC).
"But starting from next year, under our new budget, we will be adding sports such as archery, squash and badminton, for example.
"Our goal is to have a bigger pool of talent and in five to 10 years have more athletes who can deliver (Olympic) medals, instead of relying on the same one or two faces.
"We are currently in a transition phase so it will take time. When we came in, Datuk Nicol David (squash) and Datuk Lee Chong Wei (badminton) had just retired.
"But now we have new faces coming up and we want to create more."
Yeoh added that she has also placed a strong emphasis on developing sports at the grassroots and recreational level to promote a healthy lifestyle among Malaysians.
"It is not just about high performance sports, we also have to look at the grassroots as well as sports as a lifestyle," said Yeoh.
"We fought for more tax relief for sports and we were able to (roughly) double the number of sports eligible for tax relief to 103 (listed under Sports Development Act).
"This also means there are more national sports associations (under the Act) who are eligible to apply for funds via the Sports Matching Grant as well as the Community Sports Grant.
"This is to allow for more activities to be held. I want all Malaysians to have a chance to participate in sports."
The Sports Matching Grant offers sports event or programme organisers up to RM1 million in funding while the Community Sports Grant can go up to RM20,000.
There are, however, strict regulations in place to ensure that the funds are spent responsibly.