The government’s stingy treatment of national team athletes heading to the Tokyo Olympics has exposed its so-called “sports reform” as mere sloganeering.
The Olympics finally opened on Friday despite the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the departure of Taiwanese athletes was overshadowed by a controversy surrounding their flight arrangements.
The furor was ignited by an Instagram post by badminton player Tai Tzu-ying (戴資穎) on Monday, in which she that said she missed flying in EVA Air’s business class. This led to the discovery that some team officials flew in business class while Tai and other athletes were relegated to economy class.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) apologized later that day, while Sports Administration Director-General Chang Shao-hsi (張少熙) offered his resignation on Tuesday.
Other photos shared by Tai showing the condition of her hotel room added fuel to the fire, as many social media users said the room was too meager to accommodate a celebrated athlete. While some said Tai was unkind for complaining about flight seating, more people seem to have sympathy for her, mainly because the arrangement contradicted Tsai’s promises five years ago.
When sending off a national team to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Tsai made several promises, saying that all athletes and their coaches should be able to fly in business class so they could get more rest before the Games, starting with the Rio Olympics. She also said the Executive Yuan had established a sports development association to raise the level of decisionmaking and improve the environment for active and retired athletes.
After the athletes’ return from Rio de Janeiro, Tsai promised that the government would reform sports associations by improving transparency in organization, operations and finance, while tasking the Sports Administration and the Ministry of the Interior with the mission. Government funding to sports associations would be allocated according to objective performance standards, without considering special relations or illegal lobbying, Tsai said.
Over the past week, some Democratic Progressive Party members have argued that Tsai is not to blame for the flawed treatment of the athletes, as the flight and hotel arrangements were made mainly by the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee (CTOC) and sports associations, which are not supervised by lawmakers.
Lawmakers from the New Power Party and Taiwan Statebuilding Party questioned CTOC executives’ links to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Such arguments are not convincing, as Tsai’s pledges five years ago showed her administration was fully aware of the problems in the sports sector.
Trying to shift blame to the KMT and its affiliates is not always effective. After all, Tsai’s administration has been in office for five years, while Su, who took office in 2019, has installed his people in many state-run entities.
If the government has any problem with CTOC president Lin Hong-dow (林鴻道), it should influence the committee’s operations through tactics such as adjusting funding allocation.
Over the past few months, Tsai has delivered many apologies, including when a Taroko Express train derailed in Hualien County, killing 49 people in April; when the nation experienced rolling blackouts amid a local COVID-19 outbreak in May; and on June 11 for the deaths of 373 people due to the outbreak.
Tsai can apologize for her administration’s inadequacies, but apologies and promises ring hollow if they do not result in any improvements.
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