City’s tenpin bowlers hoping for lucky strike

With postponement of Asian Games, code fights to get back into regional showcase

Tenpin bowling chiefs in Hong Kong are pushing to overturn their exclusion from the Asian Games in the hope of safeguarding their financial future, in the fallout to postponement of the regional Games.

Dropped from the multisport event for the first time since 1990, bowling would risk losing its public funding – which is reliant partly on its presence at the Asian or Olympic Games – if its exile continued.

It would be a blow for a sport that provided Hong Kong’s first Asian Games gold medal, when Catherine Che Kuk-hung topped the podium in Seoul in 1986.

Now it is fighting for a reprieve, with this year’s Asiad in Hangzhou delayed until next year amid the Covid-19 battle on the mainland.

The date switch has bought extra time for the Hong Kong Tenpin Bowling Congress to seek reinstatement, having graced all bar two Asiads since becoming a medal sport at the Bangkok Games in 1978. If they succeed, their top-level funding from the Hong Kong Sports Institute will be more secure.

“With the recent decision to push back the 2022 Games, we will renew lobbying for tenpin bowling to be put back on the medal programme,” congress chairwoman Vivien Lau Chiangchu said.

“Our Asian governing body has written to the Chinese sports authority asking them to reconsider tenpin for Hangzhou, while the Hong Kong Olympic Committee has written to the Olympic Council of Asia for the inclusion of both tenpin and billiard sports.”

Lau said a new 14-lane bowling centre had been completed in Wenzhou – one of the six competition zones in Zhejiang province for the Hangzhou Games. “A lack of a proper venue was one of the reasons for omitting tenpin bowling, but this is not the case any more with the completion of the Wenzhou venue,” she said.

“It was difficult to lobby over the past couple of years, given that we could not make trips to mainland China because of the pandemic. With the Games being postponed, we will make renewed efforts to help our sport.”

Tenpin bowling is one of the 20 Tier A programmes at the Sports Institute, enjoying abundant resources to compete at the highest level. A change of policy in March by the Sports Commission meant to continue to receive those subsidies, sports need to have appeared in, or expect to appear in, several Asian Games.

That left billiard sports, which were last included in the Asian Games in 2010, set to lose their Tier A status next April. Tenpin bowling, too, moved closer to the axe, unless there is a change of heart from Hangzhou or it returns to the Asiad in 2026 or 2030.