2014 National Sports Festival: "Hot" before the opening day

(Baonghean) - On December 6, the 2014 National Sports Festival will officially open at Thien Truong Stadium, Nam Dinh Province. Before the opening ceremony, there were some "controversies". At the press conference introducing the festival held on November 26 in Hanoi, many opinions said that spending thousands of billions of VND on a festival is too wasteful. Besides, there were incidents related to table tennis...

Multi-purpose sports palace worth nearly 1,000 billion VND is preparing for the Congress.

According to the plan, the 2014 National Sports Festival will officially take place from December 6 to December 14 in Nam Dinh and some neighboring provinces. The preliminary budget up to this point for construction works, infrastructure renovation, and organization of the festival has reached over 2,000 billion VND. At the press conference of the Organizing Committee, Mr. Do Thanh Xuan, Director of the Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism of Nam Dinh, said that Nam Dinh province, the host, received 855 billion VND from the central budget to build a multi-purpose sports palace. In addition, to ensure the best conditions for athletes in competition, Nam Dinh province also allocated 150 billion VND from the budget to build a hot water swimming pool and 80 billion VND to repair and upgrade other works.

Along with that, a lot of money has been spent on building and renovating gymnasiums in the 9 co-host localities. Currently, the most massive project of the National Sports Festival is the Ha Nam Multi-purpose Gymnasium with a cost of more than 1,000 billion VND, a capacity of 7,500 seats to organize volleyball and taekwondo. Thai Binh also invested in building a gymnasium with a capacity of 5,000 seats for badminton competitions.

The question is whether it is reasonable to spend thousands of billions of dong on such projects, when the demand for the above sports is not mass. Previously, thanks to hosting a Sports Festival, many localities also took advantage of the budget to build "giant" projects, but in reality, after the festival ended, the above projects only exploited about 50% of their functions.

In addition to concerns about the effectiveness of billion-dollar projects, the "scandals" that took place in table tennis attracted public attention. Specifically, because the congress's regulations did not allow business units to register to compete, two strong business clubs, T&T Table Tennis Club and Petrosetco, spread their troops to the provinces to compete in the form of athletes signing contracts with seasonal units. For that reason, although there were no table tennis athletes, Hung Yen province was still on the list of teams participating in the congress. It is worth mentioning that 100% of the Hung Yen table tennis team, from athletes to coaches, were from T&T Table Tennis Club.

According to the National Sports Festival Transfer Regulations issued on March 26, 2013 by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, athletes are entitled to register to compete for a locality if they meet one of the following conditions: have a permanent residence in the locality; have a certificate confirming that they are athletes of the Army or Police signed by the unit head; have a contract to use athletes or a legal contract to transfer athletes before January 1, 2014. Based on this regulation, some localities believe that their troops meet the criteria of the congress regulations and are entitled to register to compete. Therefore, the Organizing Committee of the Congress still decided to let the 14 above-mentioned players compete for the "new" units, because it is completely in accordance with the regulations. This is not wrong in terms of law, but it reflects the wrong achievements and general development, creating loopholes for negative risks. If Hung Yen table tennis hires 100% of athletes from HN.T&T and if Hung Yen wins gold medal in table tennis, how should that achievement be evaluated?

There are many concerns before the official opening of the National Sports Festival. Besides the significance of the congress's scale, there are conflicting opinions, and units, for the sake of achievements, are also willing to "bend the law" to possess forces that are not trained by themselves to compete...

Vinh Liem