Opinion | 2014 a pressure test for all
With the Asian Games in South Korea this year, the city's athletes have a lot to prove but so, too, do our miserly bureaucrats
There are more significant days in the year, like your own birth dates or religious holidays like Christmas or Eid, but the dawn of a new year always brings with it a surge of hope and expectation as we eagerly look forward to our lives taking a change for the better. So it is with the birth of 2014 - and we hope and pray it will be a better year than its tumultuous predecessor, which left local sport battered and bruised.
It will be significant because it is an Asian Games year. In September, South Korea will host the second-biggest multisports Games in the world (next to the Olympics) and Hong Kong's athletes will face a stringent test in Incheon.
This is the first major Games since the multimillion-dollar refurbishment of the Hong Kong Sports Institute and all eyes, especially those of the government, will be on the athletes to see if all this money - HK$1.8 billion - was well spent in providing a world-class elite academy.
While the 2016 Olympics will be the true test, the Incheon Asian Games will give an early benchmark for administrators to gauge how each of the 16 elite sports within the SI are faring. Not all of them are Olympic sports - squash and wushu being a couple of examples - and as such the Asian Games is a more appropriate report card to judge the progress of each sport in the system.
The benchmark will be to better the previous tally of medals achieved at the Guangzhou Games four years ago, when Hong Kong returned home with a record haul of 40 medals - eight gold, 15 silver and 17 bronze.
The Asian Games will give an early benchmark for administrators to guage how each of the elite sports within the Sports Institute are faring
It is not going to be easy. Four of the eight gold medals were won in cycling, two in cue sports (snooker) with windsurfing and wushu winning the other two.