21세기를 향한 한국 엘리트스포츠의 발전 방안 = Korean Elite Sports for the 21st Century

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Korea successfully held such international games as the Asian Games in 1996 and the Seoul Olympics in 1998. The 2002 World Cup, Asian Games, and the 2003 Universiad will also be held in Seoul. The Korean government has been promoting a policy of equal development of school sports, societal sports, and elite sports, based on the belief that sports enhances national prestige and increases peoples health and quality of life,
These policies, however, have been suffering a relapse after the success of the 1998 Seoul Olympics possibly due to the downscaling of sports administration, degenerate school physical education policies, weak financial structure and the IMF, and the dearth of elite athletes, This paper reviews such relapsed current situation and proposes possible counter measures.
Korea established the Ministry of Sports in preparation for the 1998 Seoul Olympics. However, the Ministry of Sports became the Ministry of Culture and Sports after the Olympics and was changed again to Ministry of Culture and Tourism As a result, the increasing demand of sports administration was not sufficiently dealt with, leading to deterioration of sports development.
The systemic decrease in Ministry of Sports activities led to the demise of school sports administration organizations. ?o"y sports in college education and high school physical education have become second-year electives since the end of the Seoul Olympics. We, therefore, need to restore sports administration to its original state and revive school and societal sports in order to normalize the nations physical education.
The national budget for sports is 0.2 percent of the total national budget, which is one-seventh of advanced nations. The budget for elite sports tends to be decreasing twenty-seven to thirty percent. Furthermore, the budget for finding and training of new players, training of national youth players, and inviting foreign coaches have either decreased or disappeared.
Especially, due to IMF in 1997 to 2000, one hundred teams were broken up and 110 staffs and 700 players lost their jobs. This was the shaking moment for Korean sports history. Koreas record in international games was doomed to fall. As evidence, Koreas declined records are showing up in Sydney Olympics and other international games.
The number of players from elite sports winning medals in international games is decreasing. This is due to the mixed effects of changing status of school physical education and societal sports, lack of new players, poor training of good players, poor systematic management of national players, and lack of finance. We must, therefore, come up with complementary measures to prevent the depletion of elite sports resources and to continue the development of sports.