The Scheme of “Selecting, training and fostering sports talent and high-performance sports athletes up to 2035” was developed with the common goal of discovering, selecting, training and fostering talented athletes, who have special talents in some high-performance sports and advantageous sports of Vietnam so that they can reach a high level and gain high ranking in regional, continental, global competitions and Olympic Games; and talented, qualified, experienced coaches who are capable of planning strategies to train medalists in domestic and international arenas.
Training abroad to have 400 athletes who are awarded international medals.
The Scheme aims to train and foster trainers, researchers, technicians, and managers of high-performance sports so that they have good professional qualifications, meeting the requirements on recruiting and training for Vietnam to become a country with developed professional sport in Asia by 2035.
The specific objective of the Scheme is that by 2035 Vietnam can select and train about 3,700 athletes of the national team, 400 of which can gain international achievements; recruit, train and foster around 600 talented coaches, 60 of which are senior coaches; recruit and train about 400 bachelors, 300 masters, 150 doctors; and train in the short term about 680 people.
The Scheme targets the athletes, coaches, trainers, researchers, technicians, and managers of high-performance sports who are recruited from Sports Training Centers across the country and who won gold medals in national youth competitions or national championships with respect to some sports within the Scheme scope. For long-term training abroad, athletes must be at master level or candidate master level and win the gold medal at two SEA Games, Continental, Global Competitions, Olympic Game or Olympic Standard Games (depending on characteristics of each sport).
According to Mr. Tran Duc Phan, the Deputy Director General of the General Department of Sports and Physical Training cum the Leader of the team planning the implementation of the Scheme, in recent years, Vietnam’s high-performance sports have faced many difficulties in training such as inadequate facilities and ineffective training. For example, the lack of ammunition may cause difficulties for Vietnamese shooting team.
Mr. Phan also said that at present, athletes’ foreign language and IT skill is poor, making it hard for them if they are sent abroad for exchange and training. Therefore, the regulations on the improvement of facilities, expertise, foreign language skill, and IT skill in the coming time as specified in the Scheme will help address the issue, raising the achievements of Vietnamese sports teams accordingly.
At the meeting, Mr. Ta Quang Dong, the Deputy Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism affirmed that to implement the Scheme, it is necessary to identify the right objects to be recruited, trained, and fostered for key sports and key content. The recruitment, training and fostering of sport talents, trainers, researchers, technicians, and managers of high-performance sports must be on the scientific basis, meet urgent needs, apply advanced international models to the real situation of advantageous sports in Vietnam, and ensure the efficiency and quality of training of talented athletes with high achievements at home and abroad, and national, regional, continental and global level coachers. The units directly implementing this Scheme should carefully survey and estimate a detailed budget for each trip abroad as well as for reputable training institutions in the country.
The Deputy Minister stated that athletes should not be sent to other countries for training for the friendship purpose only. “The training must be practical, instead of just getting a certificate while having no real results, leading to talent waste and affecting the high-performance sport system in the long run. Foreign training would have negative consequences if the method is wrong” – he said.
Ngoc Minh