Blog

FIFA World Cup

A gist of the blog:

Taking place every four years, the FIFA World Cup has again become the talking point of the town. There are so many memorable moments in the World Cup matches that vividly illustrate the fascinating and enchanting nature of sports and athletics. In this year’s budget, I have proposed a host of initiatives to allocate resources to support elite sports, to promote sports in the community and to develop Hong Kong into a centre for major international sports events.

We will inject a total of $6 billion into the Elite Athletes Development Fund to enhance support for elite athletes. We have also been providing additional funding for disabled elite sports to support full-time training of disabled athletes. We launched a five-year development plan in January this year to provide additional funding of $130 million to the sports associations of eight team ball sports of Asian Games (namely baseball, basketball, handball, hockey, ice-hockey, softball, volleyball and water polo).

To promote sports in community, I will inject $1 billion into the sports portion of the Arts and Sport Development Fund to support sports organisations in training athletes and hosting competitions. I will also allocate $100 million for the launch of a five-year District Sports Programmes Funding Scheme to encourage sports associations in the 18 districts to organise more sports activities. In order to encourage the business sector to sponsor large-scale sports events and thereby providing our athletes with more opportunities to complete on home ground, I shall allocate $500 million for a new Major Sports Event Matching Grant Scheme.

The 2018 Asian Games and Asian Para Games will be held in Indonesia in August and October respectively, and Hong Kong will be represented by a largest-ever squad of athletes. Let’s join together to support Hong Kong’s athletes in achieving greater results in the 2018 Games.

July 15, 2018