RIO DE JANEIRO: President of the Pakistan Olympic Association (POA) Lt Gen (r) Syed Arif Hasan says that financial support and state patronage are very important to get success in sports.
“The Pakistan Sports Board must act in a professional way and join hands with the POA to take Pakistan sports forward. Formation of parallel bodies in different national sports federations must stop to save Pakistan sports from being ruined,” Arif told media an exclusive interview here Saturday.
It is interesting to mention that governments all over the world keep sports and education as their top priority, build infrastructure, hold talent development programmes for players and promote medical sciences in sports to compete the world of sports. India spend billions of dollars on sports, but in Pakistan it is totally opposite because sports are not our priority.
The 2016 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, commenced here Friday night (August 5).
A record number of countries are participating in a record number of sports. More than 10,500 athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees (NOCs), including first time entrants Kosovo and South Sudan, are taking part in the mega event.
With 306 sets of medals, the Summer Games feature 28 Olympic sports, including rugby sevens and golf, which were added by the International Olympic Committee in 2009.
These sporting events will take place at 33 venues in the host city, and at five venues in the cities of São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Brasília (Brazil’s capital), and Manaus.
These will be the first Summer Olympic Games under the IOC presidency of Thomas Bach. Rio has become the first South American city to host the Summer Olympics.
These will be the first Games to be held in a Portuguese-speaking country. Among the participating nations is also a team of 10 refugees, which was selected by the International Olympic Committee to be a symbol of hope for refugees around the world.
Pakistan is also competing at the 2016 Summer Olympics that concludes on August 21. Although Pakistan boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to political reasons, but since 1948 Pakistan is a regular participant at the Olympics.
Pakistan had a decent participation in the 2012 London Olympics, but it is unfortunate that for the first time in the history of Pakistan sports, national hockey team has failed to qualify for the Olympics.
Apart from four wild card entries in athletics and swimming, two shooters and one judoka have qualified for the Summer Games for the very first time.
Many Pakistanis find it embarrassing that for the first time in the nation’s sporting history such a small number of athletes are in Brazil for the Olympics. The seven athletes have no chance of winning medals. They are more or less participating for gaining experience.
Two shooters Ghulam Mustafa Bashir and Minhal Sohail qualified after racking up reasonable records in various international competitions while judoka Shah Hussain Shah qualified on continental quota. There are also four wild cards which are given to all the member countries by the International Olympic Committee.
They have been taken up by swimmers Liana Swan and Harris Banday, and athletes Mehboob Ali and Najma Parveen. It is a far cry from the sporting glory the country once enjoyed. As recently as 1994, Pakistan held world titles in field hockey, amateur snooker, squash and cricket. But only hockey is an Olympic sport.
Arif said Pakistan was a sports-loving nation that once prided itself on producing extraordinary athletes, mostly in the game of hockey and squash. “The country’s hockey team, which won various Olympic medals in the 1980s and 1990s, has not performed well for the last many years.” Out of ten Olympic medals Pakistan had won between 1948 and 2012, the hockey team had secured eight. Equally disappointing is the state of squash in Pakistan. Once a hugely successful sport in the South Asian country, which produced legendary players like Jahangir Khan and Jansher Khan, there is not a single player now who can reach the same heights. While cricket remains hugely popular, all other sports have seen a big decline in the past two decades. “The reason is the corporatisation of sports in Pakistan, with government paying almost no attention to nurturing talented players and providing them sporting facilities and guidance,” Arif maintained.
Lack of vision: Perhaps Arif is right. The biggest reason for the extraordinary decline in sports in Pakistan is a lack of funding and vision. Pakistan’s sports budget is the lowest in South Asia, less than that of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and even Afghanistan. The Government officials and private sector are not interested in investing in anything other than cricket. In dilapidated gyms and crumbling sports fields, Pakistan athletes lament the outdated equipment and obsolete training methods, which leave them struggling against foreign competitors who adhere to latest science-based techniques. National sports federations cannot afford to hire good coaches who are familiar with modern training techniques. Athletes are truly frustrated because mostly coaches are not literate, and they have been teaching what they taught 30 years back. Arif said without infrastructure and techniques no one can expect to win.
“For women athletes, the conditions are even worse. They are not allowed to train outdoors, and there is hardly any familial support for talented young girls.” It is true that most young girls in the deeply conservative Muslim nation are pressured by their families to stop playing sports, while those with family backing face the wrath of their communities. “The grassroots system is almost non-existent, children in schools rarely play a sport that is not cricket, and top athletes seldom compete against the world’s best as cash-strapped federations cannot afford to send them abroad.” It is interesting to note that Pakistan’s sports budget is approximately only Rs.900 million. While Rs.563 million is spent on the administrative affairs of the Pakistan Sports Board while remaining ‘peanuts’ are distributed among the national federations which can not even run their offices with those grants. “If you check the PSB records, you would find that in recent times financial grants were issued to those national sports federations, which are yet to be recognised. Whereas many genuine federations, despite having done relatively better, have been kept waiting for their due grants,” Arif said.
No doubt it is high time that the Government should run the grossly mismanaged PSB like a proper institution for the benefit of sports. If one checks the PSB records, one would find that in recent times financial grants were issued to those national sports federations, which are yet to be recognised. Arif called for united efforts by the Government and national federations in order to rid Pakistan sports of rapid decline and put them on the right track. “It is necessary to address all the issues hindering the promotion of our sports. The POA is seeking a joint sitting of all stakeholders to discuss the related matters and devise a formula on how to remove those hindrances and put the country’s sports on the right track,” Arif said
“Look, even Sri Lanka is now far ahead of Pakistan in the field of sports; this certainly should be a cause of serious concern for all the stakeholders of sports in Pakistan,” Arif, who has been holding the office of POA chief since 2004, lamented. It is a fact that the decline in our sports is nothing new because we overlooked many disciplines, other than hockey, for a long time. Only due to hockey we have been featuring in the Olympic Games. “But with the Rio Olympics, after we could not qualify even in hockey, our long failure of not qualifying for other Olympic sports has highlighted the gloomy scenario.” Arif said there was a lot of hue and cry over wild cards in the Pakistan squad for the Rio Olympics. “People must realize and check the fact that Pakistan is on wild card entries after 1964 Tokyo Olympics except for the Athens Olympics 2004 when our four boxers qualified. Now the time has come for us to seriously think about this decades-long pathetic position of ours in sports so that appropriate remedial measures can be pondered for better results in future.”
He said if the Government wanted to promote sports in the country it had to show a will for it, otherwise, conflict-like situation would ruin everything. Arif said that no Pakistani athlete had qualified for the Rio Olympics should be a wake-up call for the Government, and the country’s sporting authorities. “We should start preparing for the 2020 Olympics at the earliest to inculcate a spirit of healthy competition and team spirit in our athletes, and to earn respect in the comity of nations,” he concluded.
