Athletes were once people to be admired, emulated, while sports were seen as not just healthy pastimes, but activities that could teach youngsters the value of perseverance, hard work, teamwork and fair play.
Perhaps those were always just naive visions, but the world of sports has certainly changed as nationalism and money available to top athletes, teams, schools and sports associations skyrocketed.
Far too many people at the top of sports associations and federations at state, national, individual sport and Olympic committee level have been more concerned about maintaining control than about the welfare of athletes or the good name of their sport.
There has been an endless stream in recent years of allegations of corruption, cronyism, financial mismanagement, doping, sexual abuse and more. Taiwan has not been immune.
International Olympic Committee (IOC) executive board member Wu Ching-kuo (吳經國), the only Taiwanese member of the IOC, went from being named one of the most influential individuals of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics in Brazil to resigning on Nov. 20 last year as president of the International Boxing Association (AIBA) after 11 years, amid an investigation into allegations of financial accounting irregularities and unethical conduct.
The AIBA is to hold an extraordinary congress in Dubai, starting tomorrow, to consider proposed changes to its governance in the wake of the claims about Wu and his management of the group.
On a national level, complaints that sports associations are managed as personal fiefdoms date back years.
Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee vice chairman Tsai Szu-chueh (蔡賜爵) has long been criticized because a travel agency run by his family has managed for years to win the annual overseas travel contracts for Taiwanese athletes.
He was also the focus of a very public spat with one of the nation’s top tennis players over the selection of athletes and coaches for the Rio Olympics.
The heads of the national volleyball and swimming associations, Chang Chin-rong (章金榮) and Tony Hsu (許東雄), crop up frequently in complaints by the reform group Fair Game Taiwan.
An amendment to the National Sports Act (國民體育法) passed on Sept. 20 last year was supposed to clean up sports associations by requiring them to revise their organizational rules, open membership to individuals and to hold new board elections. They were given a deadline of March 20 to comply.
However, the amendment failed to specify that such elections should be overseen by independent observers; it also appears to have left plenty of other loopholes.
For example, though Hsu has said he would step down as head of the Chinese Taipei Swimming Association (CTSA), Fair Game said he appears to be using a tactic long employed by political party chapters and farmers’ and fishermen’s association leaders to maintain control: nominal members.
Fair Game this week said that many of the applications for individual CTSA memberships share suspicious similarities, like the 13,000 that share 13 e-mail addresses and the 1,551 that have the same home address, while more than 100 CTSA members have the same birthday or e-mail address as an association employee who is a long-time aide of Hsu’s.
The reaction by Sports Administration officials has been waterlogged to say the least, with Deputy Director-General Wang Shui-wen (王水文) saying that the law does not stipulate that an address of an association member can be owned by only one person.
Perhaps not, but it is a huge red flag that the Sports Administration should be investigating now — not waiting until a formal complaint is made or until the CTSA holds its board election.
After all, sportsmanship is supposed to be about fair play.
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