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Signs of progress offer hope for Indonesian sports
SEA Games see emergence of several new stars despite failures in track and field and swimming.
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Indonesian modern pentathletes attend a training session at the national camp in Jakarta on Dec. 7 ahead of the 30th Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in the Philippines. The red-and-white squad won four out of six gold medals up for grabs in the sport at the Games, which ended on Dec. 11. (Antara/Sigid Kurniawan)
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n a September interview with The Jakarta Post, the father figure of Indonesian athletics Mohamad “Bob” Hasan expressed concern over the country’s struggles to compete at the elite level at international sporting events.
Bob, who has managed Indonesian athletics for the last 40 years, said something was missing from the country’s sports management, as it could only produce one star at a time, a problem he said was particularly evident in athletics.
“We only manage to produce one top athlete in each period. In the 60s, we had sprinter Sarengat and then we had Purnomo in the 80s. After that, [we had] Mardi Lestari and then Suryo Agung. One top athlete per period,” said the chief of the Indonesia Athletics Association (PASI).
“This shows there is something wrong. We need to fix the sport system in Indonesia.
“We now have our world champion [sprinter] Lalu Muhammad Zohri. Where does he come from? He comes from a village in North Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara. So, we actually have a lot of talent spread across the nation but because the development system is not right, we only produce a few top athletes,” he added.
As athletics is an Olympic sport, Bob lamented the fact that young talents were often introduced to other sports at an early age.
He said it was better for young children to become familiar with athletics, as the sport was also central to the physical education curriculum.
