From the navy to being Singapore’s top sports administrator
Alan Goh is no stranger to the world of sports, and he’s making the most of his time as the new chief of national sports agency Sport Singapore
Lee U-Wen
WHEN Alan Goh shows up for this interview, the first thing he does is to hand this reporter his business card – one that has a beaming photo of him holding a basketball.
The new chief executive officer of Sport Singapore (SportSG) – the national sports agency under the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth – lets on that he played basketball almost every day when he was growing up, often at the void deck of his family’s HDB flat at Marine Parade. He eventually went on to captain the Downing College basketball team at the University of Cambridge in the UK, where he read mathematics in the 1990s.
The former competitive sailor spent 26 years in the navy and his last stop before Sport Singapore was a stint at the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) where he was its deputy secretary for development and regulation.
In his time at the ministry, he spearheaded the setup of the Singapore Digital Office in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, to promote the adoption of contactless digital payments by hawkers, coffee shop operators and micro-retailers, and the education of senior citizens on digital knowledge and skills.
As we chat about his first six months at the helm of the statutory board, it becomes evident that the 47-year-old is enjoying his work very much, having taken over the reins from Lim Teck Yin, who stepped down at the end of March this year after 12 years in charge.
“The surprising thing is that I’m enjoying it way more than I expected,” Goh tells BT Weekend at his office at the Singapore Sports Hub in Kallang. “I joined the navy because of my passion for sailing, and it’s interesting how things have come full circle for my career, now that I’m at SportSG.”
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In this interview, the father of two talks about his early impressions of the job and his views on the government’s takeover of the Sports Hub, among various other topics. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
You came from MCI where you did policy work, and now you’re heading a statutory board. How’s the new job been so far, and has it lived up to your expectations? I’m a sports fan and a sports lover all my life. My generation grew up reading The Straits Times. I remember stealing the paper from my parents, flipping to the back and reading the sports pages and absorbing every column about what’s going on everywhere in the world. There was no Internet at the time, and the newspaper is where we got our news, other than TV.
Before coming into this role at SportSG, I did consult people in the fraternity about my suitability, given how this is a very unique civil service job and not your typical “statutory board CEO” job.
Their advice to me was it would be great if I took the job, but to go in with my eyes open because there are challenges. Five to six months on, it’s been within the realm of what I had anticipated. The surprising thing is that I’m enjoying it way more than I expected.
I think why I’m enjoying it so far is the fact I joined at an excellent time. Singapore has come out of the Covid-19 pandemic, things have reopened and events are back in full swing. We had the SEA Games in Cambodia earlier this year, and the Asian Games in Hangzhou are ongoing (and coming to a close this weekend).
There are so many events at the Sports Hub, such as table tennis, rugby, e-sports, badminton and others. On the entertainment front, there was the series of concerts by Jacky Cheung and Blackpink, and we’ve got Coldplay and Taylor Swift coming next year.
In the short time I’ve been at SportSG, probably the thing I’m most satisfied with is the National School Games returning to the National Stadium in a big way. There was very little of this in the last 10 years, and I’m glad to see all the students back at the stadium.
Did you speak to Teck Yin much before you took over from him? I talked to him at length. I knew him from the Singapore Armed Forces when he was commandant of the SAFTI Military Institute. That was his final posting before he joined what was then the Singapore Sports Council.
Teck Yin has done some amazing things during his 12 years. He launched Vision 2030, and we see the impact of that initiative. There’s an increase in the number of high-performance athletes, and many of them are doing very well regionally and globally. There are more sports centres in our neighbourhoods, and people are happy to have this quality of sports facilities near their homes. It’s all part of our goal to make sports accessible to the entire community.
It’s nearly a year since the government completed the takeover of the Singapore Sports Hub, putting an end to the public-private-partnership (PPP) with the consortium. What’s different now? We’ve been able to more properly manage the whole portfolio of events we offer at the venue. Candidly, I feel the PPP can work, but our experience was (that the previous owners) of the Sports Hub were naturally commercially minded, and so it’s natural that every event they want to hold, they will first think of their commercial interests and profit.
All around the world where good sports facilities are managed, either publicly or privately, the ones that can make money will try to put it back towards serving the community. If you ask me, the Sports Hub PPP could have done that. But maybe because of the shareholders, dividends and interest, the instinct to do that was not as high, certainly not to the extent we would have hoped. Therefore, we hardly had any National School Games at the Sports Hub in the last 10 years.
What’s changed now with the government’s ownership is there’s less pressure to chase profits, because you don’t answer to shareholders, in that sense. Now it’s about striking that balance in terms of lifestyle and entertainment events, sporting events and community events.
Do you think the PPP model was given a long enough runway to prove itself? I don’t rule out (the relevance of) PPPs. I do think they can work. But you do need to structure it so that it can achieve your objectives. You also need a partner who has the same interests.
Over time, people do change. And as a citizen watching, the Sports Hub PPP didn’t seem to work as well, because we only saw a certain line-up of events. They were not bad, but the people that suffered were the schools and the community.
This year we’ve brought GetActive, SportCares and the kids into the stadium. These are things that probably wouldn’t have happened that easily, if the PPP was still in effect. We had peripheral activities for the Rugby 7s (in April) and the Singapore Festival of Football (in July). Hopefully, over time, people will feel the Sports Hub is a nice place to visit, even on non-event days.
What’s coming up in the next few months for SportSG? Apart from the Asian Games, we are busy with our Team Singapore athletes and their qualification for next year’s Olympics in Paris. We’re also hosting all kinds of events such as women’s world floorball championships and the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon (both in December), and these come after we held the inaugural Professional Triathletes Organisation Asian Open here in August.
We recently launched a new programme to provide support for athletes who show promise of winning gold medals at the Sea Games level, called the Sports Excellence Potential. This is in addition to our Sport Excellence Scholarship programme launched in 2013, which offers support to those who are deemed to have potential to excel on the Asian and global stage.
Do you play or watch a lot of sports these days? I watch all sports, except maybe cricket (laughs). I’m a big sports fan. I grew up playing a lot of basketball, and the rest of my family plays too. In school I was a competitive sailor and the captain of Victoria Junior College’s sailing team when we became the A-Division champions.
I enjoy playing football, although I’m not very good at it. In my time at SportSG, I get the chance to meet and spend time with our Team Singapore athletes. I even had the chance to play a mixed doubles badminton match against Loh Kean Yew, so that was quite fun.
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