Huge cash injection boosts 'amateurs’

Press, 15 August 1978, Page 30

Huge cash injection boosts ' amateurs’

NZPA staff correspondent Edmonton

Canada's Minister of Sport (Mrs lona Campagnolo) has defended the position where it is possible for top Canadian swimmers to draw expenses of up to $12,000 a year plus free medical and dental treatment. “I do not think there are any amateurs, in the strict sense, left in the world,” she said.

In the past year the Canadian Federal Government has poured S2SM into amateur U* addi«i£u» ito

provincial governments and private enterprise have also made heavy contributions. After the Games ended on Sunday, Mrs Campagnolo said she was working on a plan which would make it easier for private enterprise to give cash for sport. “The Prime Minister has just announced an across-the-board reduction in spending of two billion dollars and it is reasonable to expect sport will have to make some cut — possibly up to a million dollars,” she said.

augurated the “Game Plan” programme which is designed to create a climate of excellence for amateur sport. In that year only 47 Canadian athletes were placed in the top 16 in the world in any sport. The number now stands at 135.

The programme provides Canadian sportsmen and women with top-level coaching, travel and competition opportunities both in Canada and overseas. It provides “card athletes” — those with the best international prospects ■ — with living and

and lost-time payments as well as money for necessary equipment. Game Plan is now developing programmes which are designed to bring Canadian participants to the top for the Pan-American Games in Puerto Rico next year and the 1980 Olympics ’in Moscow.

“We will place second at the Pan-American Games,” Mrs Campagnolo predicted, “and at Moscow we will do no worse than finish in the top 10 nations.’ “It is part of our philoso---fihiy sot to apologise for

winning.” Part of Mrs Campagnolo’s sports budget comes from “Loto Canada” the national lottery which was introduced as a way of raising funds to repay the huge debt that was incurred with the staging of the Olympic Games in Montreal. So far the organisation — it runs a regular lottery with first prize of one million dollars — has paid SI27M off the debt, which leaves only about $lOOO5l to go. Leto’s profits are split three ways — 82.5 per cent for the Olympic debt, 12.5

per cent to the provinces for welfare programmes and 5 per cent for sport. Mrs Campagnolo told one questioner at a press conference that she did not consider Canada’s “must win” complex at the Edmonton Games had brought a change to the originators’ philosophy that the Empire Games should be merrier and less stem than other international events. “I do not believe there has been any change — and I do believe the Commonwealth Games will long outlast the Olympics,” she said.