The post-mortem for Malaysia’s Sea Games failure in the Philippines recently started yesterday under the National Sports Council (NSC).
Aquatics, football and basketball officials and athletes were called up to face the NSC as well as Olympic Council of Malaysia officials.
After declaring a 70-gold target, the Malaysian contingent became a big disappointment at the Sea Games, winning only 56 gold.
“We will be calling the other sports batch-by-batch to find out what went right, wrong as well as the surprise packages at the Sea Games,” NSC director-general Datuk Ahmad Shapawi Ismail said.
“We can’t announce the findings until we listen to all the athletes and officials involved. We did present a snap report right after the Sea Games ended but that only touched the surface of matters, because Malaysia failed to hit the target.”
At the 2017 KL Sea Games, Malaysia had emerged overall champions with 145 gold but at the 2019 edition, hosts Philippines dropped 69 events, of which about 50 per cent of the events were those that Malaysia had excelled in.
“Only 76 events which Malaysia won gold in KL2017 were contested in Philippines, and we won 56 gold medals.
“We will now find out why some sports did exceptionally well, while others failed to deliver,” added Shapawi.
Malaysia fielded a total of 773 athletes for 52 out 56 sports at the Philippines Games. The silver count was 57 and bronze 71.
After the end of the Games earlier, Shapawi had said: “We also failed to meet some targets because we were overconfident with the data provided by NSAs, some of which were for new sports and also by sports which did not even have a track record or association to begin with.
“We arrived at the Philippines overconfident... as the defending champions and were the second largest contingent behind the hosts (772 athletes for 52 sports).”
NSC must make sure the ongoing post-mortem will yield better data for the 2021 Vietnam Sea Games.
Vietnam, who swept 98 gold in the Philippines Sea Games, are the best bets to become the next overall champions.