Philippine Olympic Committee chief Jose Cojuangco Jr. is positive that Malaysia will give more weight to Olympic sports when it hosts the 2017 Southeast Asian Games.
Malaysian organizers announced that Olympic disciplines would be given priority while the number of non-Olympic events that have been seeing action regularly in the biennial sportsfest would be cut down.
“I’m confident that the proposed arrangement of two sports categories in Malaysia will push through,” said Cojuangco.
He explained that Malaysia, which will stage the Games in KL and Borneo, brought up a new dimension in the 11-nation meet featuring a separate medal standing for Olympic and non-Olympic sports.
“It’s about time we separate these two categories. We must put more premium on Olympic sports if we want to perform well in the Olympics,” said Cojuangco.
Host countries have figured prominently in the previous SEA Games primarily due to the number of indigenous sports that they had calendared.
As host, a country is inclined to take advantage by picking the sports alien to other countries and scheduling events where it could win more gold medals.
“Olympic medalists from our region have recently diminished partly due to this practice. We forgot to focus more on Olympic events and instead become more concern with the overall title,” said Cojuangco.
The Philippines is bidding to host the 2019 edition of the SEA Games and Cojuangco said the POC would gladly support the proposed Malaysian model of having two overall championships.