Singapore drops karate from SEA Games, picks floorball
Wednesday, 30 April 2014 00:00
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REUTERS: Hosts Singapore added floorball and petanque to the 2015 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games on Tuesday but karate missed out despite offering to pay its way in, with weightlifting and wrestling also dumped due to budget constraints.
The 28th edition of the biennial multi-sport competition for the 11 nations in the region will feature 36 sports and 402 events, with the organisers wary of delivering an on budget Games after Vietnam recently pulled out of hosting the much-bigger 2019 Asian Games because of costs.
Dr. Tan Eng Liang, Chairman of the SEA Games Federation Executive Committee, said boxing, equestrian, rowing, and volleyball had also made the cut to join the original 30 sports approved at the last SEA Games in Myanmar in December.
The selection of sports for the event is always contentious with the host nation allowed to pick a number of local events such as petanque, a form of boules that is popular in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Floorball is a type of indoor hockey originated in Europe but growing in popularity in Singapore schools.
Myanmar opted to include bodybuilding, chinlone – a mix between football kick ups and dancing – and the Vietnamese martial art of Vovinam when they hosted, with all three among the nine sports ditched by Singapore.
The city-state had already approved the inclusion of ten pin bowling, softball, squash and water skiing for 2015 and said that they had selected sports to help boost their medal tally as well as keeping in mind the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.
“We cannot come in last, no country wants that,” Chris Chan, Chairman of the SEA Games Federation Sport and Rules Committee, told reporters.
“Of the 36 sports, 34 are Asian Games sports, 24 are Olympic sports, only two are not in the two major games, floorball and netball.
“The SEA Games must be an important platform for athletes to use those events to then prime themselves for the Olympics.”
Singapore, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2015 and will use the soon-to-be-open $ 1 billion sports hub facility, have won four Olympic medals with three coming in table tennis, which has appeared in every SEA Games since the inaugural 1959 edition in Bangkok.
Their only other medal came in weightlifting, but the Olympic sport was dumped despite heavy lobbying.
“We did go to a higher level to see if we could include one or two more as the appeal was very strong for more than 36,” Tan told reporters.
“Unfortunately the main reason given to us was we don’t want you to go over the budget.”
