Malta would have to rethink national sports heroes like Pawlu Mifsud, Tony Drago and William Chetcuti if a rigid definition of sport prevailed, Malta Sports Council chairman Bernard Vassallo has said, defending the crowning of a table football player as sportsman of the year.
He said that if table football were dropped as a sport because it involved little or no physical exertion, then many popular disciplines would also have to be excluded from the awards.
Great sporting names like amateur billiards world champion Pawlu Mifsud, professional snooker star Tony Drago, world powerboat racing champion Aaron Ciantar and double trap shooter William Chetcuti would have to be excluded from the award, which three of them received more than once, he argued.
But ever since Massimo Cremona, a table football player who played a major role in the success of the national team in the World Championship last year, was crowned with the title on Saturday, timesofmalta.com and social networking sites have been crowded with comments from sceptics.
“Champion of the world in finger flicking! By winning the SportMalta trophy award in finger flicking should we encourage our children to take this “sport”? Is this the way to beat obesity and keep children healthy?” a commentator asked.
Others asked if video games and beer drinking would be included in next year’s event, while a marathon runner joked that this year he would be nudging a miniature model of himself along a board-sized route instead of running the distance.
However, awards chairman and renowned sports official Pippo Psaila said: “I can’t see why all the controversy.” Sport was well defined by the Council of Europe: In a nutshell, it was something that exercised the mind and the body.
“If one had to take that definition, one would come to the logical answer to the question,” he said.
Similarly, Sports Journalists’ Association president Charles Camenzuli said “there was nothing to argue about,” pointing out that Mr Cremona had been chosen through a voting mechanism that involved the public, journalists’ and sports’ associations’ votes.
The KMS chairman acknowledged that “the definition of sport is not as clear cut as some of us would like it to be”, pointing out that this had been the subject of debate for many years.
However, he insisted that the athletic argument would exclude a raft of very popular disciplines.
“Do we really want this exclusion? KMS has chosen otherwise,” he said, pointing out that the council promoted all sports because it believed that, properly practised, they all had a positive effect on personal, social and economic development.
The Malta Table Football Association, he said, was a registered member of KMS, which made it eligible for participation.
He also pointed out that Mr Cremona had been nominated by the sport journalists’ selection committee because during 2010, he played a leading role in the national team that won the Table Football World Championships in Germany. He also placed third in the individual competition in the same world championships and was a member of the Italian team Bari Reggione, winners of the European Football Championships league.
Mr Cremona preferred not to comment about the issue when contacted. However, he detailed his training schedule to the newspaper.
“Today I woke up at 5.45 a.m. for a 5km run with Judoka Marcon Bezzina. At 7 a.m. I was at the gym for two hours.
After that I had two hours of training (table football training) at home, rested an hour and trained for another two hours,” he said.
This was the routine he followed three to four times a week.