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wish to excel in their chosen sports.
Our High Performance Sports system, introduced in 2013, provides support to more than 1,000
carded athletes across 50 sports. On top of this, we recently introduced the SpEx Scholarship
or the Sports Excellence Scholarships
to enable our top and promising athletes to train fulltime. The inaugural batch of scholarships
was awarded to 64 athletes across 15 sports in September last year. We expect to award
more scholarships this year for talented athletes who wish to pursue fulltime training. Indeed, based
on the performances in the recent SEA Games, there are several promising candidates and
we look forward to receiving their applications. The $40 million Sports Excellence budget,
which Mr Fang mentioned, already provides for this.
The High Performance Sports system and the SpEx Scholarship programme under it are intended
to support athletes with the potential and ability to excel at the international level,
across all sports. We provide targeted levels of support according to how well the athletes
have performed, how far they can go, and how much they are willing to commit to training.
We also set clear performance requirements for these athletes, and if there are athletes
who do not measure up, then funding support will cease. So the support is tied strictly
to individual performance, and not to the type or number of sports.