Pak swimmers miss out on pre-Olympic opportunity

KARACHI: As Pakistan, like other nations around the world, begins to think about the upcoming 2016 Olympic Games at Rio de Janeiro less than 100 days from Wednesday (today), its sporting federations should also be considering what performances will be recorded at the sporting venues in Brazil.

In 2012, Pakistan sent 21 athletes, including its hockey team, to the London Games and finished without a single medal and a rank of 80 out of the 204 nations competing, many of whom have very small populations. Four of its athletes entered on wildcards, meaning they did not meet qualifying standards in their event for the Olympic Games. This time, Pakistan will be hoping to do better. But will it?

Taking one of the sports Pakistan competed in in 2012, swimming, which offers one of the largest number of medals available among Olympic sports with at least 114 medals available in the 19 events for men and 19 for women, Pakistan appears to have missed out on a valuable opportunity to raise the caliber of its swimmers.

In May 2015, the FINA ‘Targeting Rio’ scholarship programme began at the state-of-the-art training venue at Thanyapura in Thailand. The programme offered Asian swimmers an opportunity to try and better their times and meet Olympic qualifying standards through an expertly designed, specialised training programme run for one year under the head coach at Thanyapura, Miguel Lopez from Spain who has trained Olympians and para-Olympians over a hugely successful career.

The results from Thanyapura have been dramatic, with over 100 national record times bettered since it began. According to Lopez, speaking to ‘The News’, “This programme has helped create a competition culture in the swimmers’ countries. All in all we have set or broken national records over 100 times in the last eight months.”

For example, Mahfizur Rahman Sagor of Bangladesh had a best time of 1:59 seconds for the 200m freestyle event before he joined the 20 or so other swimmers at Thanyapura. His time after just over six months of top class training at Thanyapura had dropped to 1:54.05, a new national record for Bangladesh. Kimiko Raheem of Sri Lanka has shown similar improvements, improving her 100m backstroke time from a pre-Thanyapura standard of 1:06 to 1:02 after the training programme.

Swimmers training at Thanyapura broke more than 24 national records at the South Asian Games held at Guwahati from February 6th to 16th this year.

Mahfizur Rahman Sagor, still training at Thanyapura and looking towards Rio where he will represent his country and hopes to bring glory in the swimming pool, told The News, “The Thanyapura training programme has really helped me a lot, enabled me to set national records.”

Countries like war-torn Syria, Rwanda, Myanmar and a host of other nations were able to send their swimmers to the rainbow gathering at Thanyapura, where many spent a year attempting to achieve their very best.

Unfortunately, Pakistan was not able to send even a single swimmer to Thanyapura and join the other Asian nations there. This appears to have been a loss to Pakistan swimming, especially for swimmers based within the country rather than those who train outside. Among these swimmers, many have of course improved times. But the difference is too little to move them any closer to an Olympic qualifying times.

Many of Pakistan’s records still date back to the early 1990s, such as Muhammad Maroof’s record for the 100m freestyle set in 1991 with a time of 55.60. The records for the 200m, 400m and 1500m freestyle also date back to the same time period and are held by Maroof and Kamal Masood between them. The 50m freestyle record was finally broken at the SAGs by Haseeb Tariq, who currently trains in Canada.