The recent Olympic Games have put different athletes and sports in the spotlight. Many of us are jumping on the bandwagon and pledging to learn a new sport. Whether the enthusiasm can be sustained remains to be seen.

The phenomenal success of our athletes calls for visionary planning for sports development in Hong Kong. In retrospect, the fruitful outcome this year can be attributed to a decade of perseverance, resilience and can-do spirit demonstrated by the athletes and coaching teams. Yet, the lack of a clear plan for the future is cause for concern.

The crux of the matter is that physical education is often degraded and subordinated to the formal school curriculum. Despite the mushrooming of other learning experiences and special admission schemes for athletes, many parents and sports team members seem to have doubts about the prospects of spending time on extracurricular activities, let alone making professional careers of them.

If there is not enough new blood to replenish the talent pool, it will be difficult to foster a wholesome development of sports in the long run, however abundant the available financial resources are.

This points to the need for a paradigm shift in career and life planning. Education plays a vital role in maximising students’ future prospects and helping them realise the meaning of life. Students should be encouraged to break free from social stereotypes of different career pathways, and be exposed to the idea that sports can lead to a promising career.

The government can reassure them by investing in the future of their sporting careers and rolling out an employment scheme that helps athletes move on to other professions after their retirement from sports.

Employers can be given incentives to employ retired athletes, while athletes should be offered further study opportunities to transform their sports expertise into hard and soft skills needed in the job market.

It’s about time policymakers realised the social benefits of popularising the sports movement. Not only will it promote the physical and psychological well-being of students, a healthy population will also lower public expenditure on health care.

Indeed, promoting sports is only part of a wider goal of advancing humanity through education. Music, drama, debate and voluntary service deserve equal attention. After all, the significance of an all-round education should not be evaluated in terms of the number of gold medals earned.