The Sports Administration yesterday said it would launch a review of how each sports association chooses members of its national team, while coaches and athletes are now able to file complaints directly on the agency’s Web site.
Sports Administration Director-General Lin Te-fu (林德福) made the remarks in response to controversy sparked by swimmer Mitzi Ting (丁聖祐), who complained that she was not chosen to compete in the 50m butterfly at the Taipei Universiade because the Chinese Taipei Swimming Association favored other swimmers over her, even though she won gold in the event at the National Intercollegiate Athletic Games earlier this year.
Lin reiterated that his agency valued each and every excellent athlete and would not allow any individual or system to ignore them.
“To ensure that athletes compete fairly, we will comprehensively review the system that is used to form national teams, train national team athletes and compete in international games. The agency also sees personnel reshuffles in each sports association in the latter half of this year as one of the crucial steps to sports reform,” Lin said.
Sports associations that formed national teams to compete in the Universiade have been asked to disclose how they chose athletes, including the procedures and the standards that were applied to select them.
Coaches must list why they recommended certain athletes in each event, he said, adding that all information would be uploaded to the Chinese Taipei University Sports Federation’s Web site (www.ctusf.org.tw) for public review.
The Sports Administration’s Web site would also have a special section for coaches and athletes who want to file complaints regarding the selection process for national teams.
There would be no major issues if athletes were chosen according to the guidelines governing the selection and training of national team athletes, as each body would have to list the criteria and procedures that an athlete has to meet and follow to qualify for a national team, Lin said.
Controversy often begins when no athletes meet the criteria and coaches have to make recommendations on athletes, as the public might question why an athlete was recommended, he added.
The criteria used to pick swimmers for the national team were stipulated by the Chinese Taipei University Sports Federation, the Chinese Taipei Swimming Association said.
If swimmers were chosen strictly based on the criteria, only swimmers in the men’s 50m freestyle and men’s 400m freestyle would have qualified for the national team, it added.
As Taiwan is hosting the Universiade, the association had to draft athletes to compete, even if they did not meet the criteria, the swimming body said.
No female swimmers met the criteria to qualify for the national team at the Universiade, but it wanted to use the opportunity to train relay swimmers to prepare them for next year’s Asian Games, it added.
Female swimmers were mainly drafted to compete in relay races, in which each competitors has to swim 100m, the swimming association said.
Due to Ting’s complaints, only one female swimmer is to compete in individual events at the Universiade, it added.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods