The government may change its rewards program for Olympic athletes, a Sports Affairs Council (SAC) official said yesterday.
SAC Deputy Minister Chen Hsien-chung (陳顯宗) told the Taipei Times in a telephone interview that the council would seek suggestions from the public from next week on changing the National Honor Prize (國光獎金) program, which rewards athletes based on their performance at the Olympics.
The announcement followed a controversy surrounding reports that the members of Taiwan’s baseball team — with the exception of Chang Tai-shan (張泰山), who tested positive for doping — would each receive NT$1.5 million under the program despite a lackluster performance.
The team took fifth place after losing five games in a row, with many fans especially upset by the team’s loss to China.
This year, the council announced that winners of gold medals would receive NT$12 million, while silver and bronze medals would be rewarded with NT$7 million and NT$5 million respectively.
Those who do not return with a medal can still bag a reward. Competitors in track and field, swimming, weightlifting, archery, shooting, sailing, rowing, cycling, taekwondo and judo who take fourth place will receive NT$3 million, fifth or sixth place NT$1.5 million and seventh or eighth place NT$900,000.
Baseball and softball players are to be awarded according to the same rules, but with no prize for finishing seventh or eighth.
Table tennis, badminton and tennis players will be given the same amount as other athletes for first, second, third or fourth place and NT$1.2 million for fifth to eighth place.
But some fans said the baseball players did not deserve the money.
“We are not talking about NT$100,000 or NT$200,000, which might be bearable,” a woman surnamed Huang said in Taipei. “It’s NT$1.5 million!”
Huang said that the government should offer awards only for medal winners and fourth place.
But Chen defended the baseball team’s performance, saying “fifth place was good enough,” given that the team faced quite a few tough competitors.
However, the reward system should take public opinion into account, he said.
The council will abide by the rules in doling out awards.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching