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ndonesia is not happy with the absence of weightlifting and rowing, as well as other sports in which it sees gold-medal potential, from the upcoming 2017 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in Kuala Lumpur.

It is dealing with the situation by pushing backbone sports, including badminton and the martial art pencak silat, to go the extra miles to collect more medals at next year’s event.

“We are disappointed with the result of [Thursday’s] meeting,” Doddy Iswandi, secretary general of Indonesian Sports Committee (KOI), told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

He referred to the meeting that saw the SEA Games Federation approving 38 sports (14 of which are Olympic sports) and 405 events for the biennial 29th Games from Aug. 19 to 31, 2017.

Some of the sports not included are Olympic sports weightlifting, rowing, beach volleyball as well as non-Olympic sports bridge and martial art tarung drajat, which were all proposed by Indonesia.

“The idea of omitting a list of Olympic sports from the SEA Games is simply because the hosting country has no medal chance in them,” said Doddy.

Doddy also said that the reason provided by local organizers to deny bridge a place — that the sport is “closely associated with gambling in Malaysia” — was “peculiar”.

With the unavailability of the aforementioned sports, Indonesia has lost several disciplines in which it was hoping to bag medals.

“Nevertheless, we have to be ready. Other sports, such as badminton, judo and sepak takraw, will carry a heavier burden to contribute more medals,” said Doddy.

Doddy hopes that at future SEA Games events, organizers will be able to include all 28 Olympic sports in the name of sportsmanship to reduce the number of traditional sports.

Responding to the removals, Indonesia’s Satlak Prima elite program head Sucipto called for a small but efficient contingent to be prepared for the upcoming Kuala Lumpur Games.

“We should only deploy athletes who have medal potential,” he added.

Meanwhile, Budiman Setiawan, the high performance director for the Indonesian Rowing Association (PODSI), expressed his discontent.

 ““[The scrapping of rowing from the multi-sport events] will damage the Federation’s country members because rowing athletes in our region will never be able to reach the level to compete with East Asian countries and India at the Asian Games, and other countries in the Olympics,” he added.