Sports tourism is one of the major policies that has come from the Policy Address of 2021 (LAG2021) and is set for concrete implementation this year. In April, Chief Executive (CE) Ho Iat Seng announced that the government was aiming to hold one major international sports event in Macau per month for the year.
Now, the CE says that the plan is one of his top priorities again and will be implemented in 2021.
In a reply yesterday to lawmaker Ma Chi Seng on the developments and opportunities on this new sector for Macau, Ho said he had the final proposal in his possession already. He also suggested that an agreement with the six gaming concessionaires has been reached, and each one of them will host or title sponsor two events per year.
“We have been talking to the gaming concessionaires to organize two of these events for each one. This means 12 events per year that will be held not concurrently, but tentatively one per month,” Ho said, adding, “the gaming concessionaires provided a positive response and from the end of this year, we are already doing some events that are possible to host like the [Macau International] Marathon and the World Table Tennis Championships.”
According to the CE, the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, Elsie Ao Ieong U, has already delivered the complete list of proposed events for 2021. It is the responsibility of the CE to give his final approval on the list.
“This has been a very big headache for me. We don’t know if people from abroad can join but we are doing this work in advance as this is not something we can do from one day to the next,” the CE remarked, noting that the decision to host the Macau Grand Prix this year was already very complex.
“All these events are of a large scale and have many participants from abroad. I need to give a reply to Ao Ieong U but this is difficult. We need to decide now and this is a big problem I have to solve right now,” Ho said, reaffirming, “Not to do anything is the easy response but I can’t take such a decision. To cancel does not produce any positive effect. We can’t restrict our tourism sector services to just 600,000 people [the population of Macau].”
Although not hosting the events would save some money, from the CE’s perspective this could cause even bigger problems than just money.
“We really want to host one large scale event per month and we are not saying that we will exclude the hosting of other of smaller scale events,” Ho said.
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