Giving credits to Pandelela Pamg Rinong for her world class feat

Recently I have mentioned to our media friends that Sarawak will ac­cord some kind of re­ward to na­tional diver Pan­delela Pamg Ri­nong for se­cur­ing Malaysia’s first-ever gold medal at this year's FINA Diving World Cup but I have also pointed out that it was not good to al­ways re­ward ath­letes each time they won some­thing.

This is because if we keep on think­ing of giv­ing re­wards ev­ery time some­body gets a gold medal or achieves fame, it will not be good also be­cause ath­letes nor­mally love their sport and they are pas­sion­ate about what they are do­ing. But Sarawak will have its own way of re­ward­ing them and I had been re­ceiving phone calls from peo­ple ask­ing if the state would ac­cord Pan­delela with a Datuk­ship in recog­ni­tion of her sport­ing achieve­ments, sim­i­lar to several other renowned na­tional ath­letes.

My re­ply to them was, she is only 28 years old and we should not spoil her. I mean this because can you imag­ine some­one in their 20s hav­ing a Datuk­ship? It will be very dif­fi­cult for her to in­ter­act nor­mally out­side – when you got friends out­side, they call you ‘Datuk’ and things like that. What I have meant is to let Pendelela en­joy her life. The mon­e­tary con­tri­bu­tion from the state govern­ment will come, but we do not want to high­light it too much. We would want her to bring us more fame and for her to en­joy the sport that she loves.

I have also cred­ited Pan­delela’s achieve­ments for cre­at­ing a lot of in­ter­est in diving among younger Sarawakians. I can also see that we do have quite a num­ber of young ath­letes com­ing up in diving from Sarawak, which prob­a­bly in the next few years we would be able to see them cre­at­ing waves, maybe in state or na­tional cir­cuits. It is hope with Pandelela's lat­est gold medal won at world level will cre­ate more in­ter­est in diving as well as other wa­ter sports.