Taiwanese athletes stood out at the Tokyo Olympics, and thanks to their outstanding performance, the national team won more medals than at any previous Olympics.
In addition to their talent and long-term, high-intensity training, a key to their success lies in Taiwan’s growing sports budget, ensuring the quality of athletes’ training and access to resources.
Additional funding comes from the Taiwan Sports Lottery, which contributes to the Ministry of Education’s Sports Development Fund.
In other words, Taiwan was able to win 12 medals at the Olympics thanks to the sports lottery.
Before the Sports Affairs Council was transformed into the Sports Administration, then-council planning department head Peng Tai-lin (彭台臨) in 2001 invited some finance and economics experts, including me, to a seminar about the nation’s sports industry, with focus on how Taiwan can boost public support for its Olympic athletes and help them win more medals.
At the event, I suggested that the government emulate other countries and launch a sports lottery to raise the massive funds needed for sports development.
The following year, I helped the council organize a national conference on sports development, with the introduction of a sports lottery high on the agenda.
I invited sports lottery experts from Japan and South Korea to share their experience.
At the conference in Taipei, the Taiwan’s sports authorities set the goal of raising more development funds and therefore sought to establish a sports lottery.
A few years later, in 2007, the Cabinet finalized the plan, and the lottery was launched on May 2, 2008.
In the 13 years since, lottery ticket sales totaled NT$319 billion (US$11.45 billion), with 10 percent, or NT$31.9 billion, going to the government.
Aside from paying for running costs of sports and exercise development, the sales have also contributed to the Sports Development Fund, which contains more than NT$10 billion.
Over the past few years, the sports lottery’s annual surplus has been about NT$4 billion, also benefiting the government.
From 2008 to 2013, the period of the sports lottery’s first license, it was NT$77.1 billion.
As for the second license period, from 2014 to 2023, ticket sales reached NT$24 billion in 2014 and peaked at NT$43.4 billion in 2018.
Since 2013, sales totaled NT$241 billion, or average annual sales of NT$34.5 billion.
Despite the global COVID-19 pandemic, last year’s sales were NT$40.5 billion.
Taiwan’s sports authorities are unquestionably the biggest winners of the sports lottery.
In 2018, using the ample funds in the Sports Development Fund, the Sports Administration chartered flights for Taiwanese athletes to attend the Asian Games in Indonesia, where many of them performed outstandingly.
Similarly, with the help of the fund, the National Sports Training Center in Kaohsiung is offering four-star accommodation to athletes during training, which also contributed to the Taiwanese team’s great achievements at the Tokyo Olympics.
Liu Day-yang is a professor in National Taiwan University of Science and Technology’s Graduate Institute of Finance.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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