Official: Only four ready

By JACK AMI
ONLY four provinces are prepared for the 5th PNG Games in November in Kokopo.
They are National Capital District, Morobe, Autonomous Region of Bougainville and hosts East New Britain while the other 18 are still struggling – but ready by entries and numbers.
This was the assessment of Papua New Guinea Sports Foundation’s Youth Sports development officer Scott Vavine who had travelled the country to conduct the Youth and Sports Community and Leadership courses in sports administration.
Vavine said this was a case study of all 22 provinces’ ability to participate in the PNG Games and he found that 18 provinces would not be ready on time.
He said the 18 had their weakness and should not force athletes to travel to Kokopo “for the fun of it”.
“These provinces have not built on their areas of weakness since the 2009 Games in the National Capital District in terms of athlete development and management.
“You take new provinces Hela and Jiwaka who are starting from scratch and include provinces that are a long way from the PNG Games host town and their slowness in raising funds and preparing their teams and they will struggle” Vavine said.
He urged the sports administrators that if the provinces did not have the funds to send all the codes to Kokopo they had to make some hard decisions quickly.
“They should take the second option and only be represented by codes with strong medal prospects to save costs.
“These four provinces have quality and competitive athletes favoured to claim most of the medals,” he said.
“This is a big problem and most of these provinces will confront stiff opposition during the Nov 19-30 event.
“The PNG Games was introduced in 2003 and by now all the provinces should be competitive and identify its talents and trained by certified coaches or trainers to win medals and break national records.
“This should be bigger and better Games with all competitive athletes to be tapped and identified, nurtured and groomed as international material by respective national federations.”
Vavine said provinces should be taking quality to the Games and not quantity with athletes who would go on to represent PNG in the 2015 Pacific Games which was one of the pillars the PNG Games was founded on, to identify and tap the grassroots talents.
“The national and provincial governments and the corporate sector are injecting so much money into this endeavour but we must make certain that the athletes are good enough to be there otherwise the whole point of finding talent fails.”