Bashir’s ouster leaves Arshad alone in hunt for medal

PARIS (France): Shooter Ghulam Mustafa Bashir’s failure to make it to the 25m Rapid Fire Pistol finals has left javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem as the last hope for Pakistan to win a medal following 32 years of agonizing wait at the Olympic Games.

It was in 1992 that the Pakistan hockey team last won the bronze medal at the Olympics. In the individual category, Hussain Shah won bronze in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Since then the faulty system and poor handling of sports strings in the country have fetched poor results.

So much so that Pakistan possibly is the only country in the world, where there is no sports ministry at the Centre. The half-broken strings of Pakistan sports are being handled by amateur and incompetent Ministry for the Inter-Provincial Coordination’s (IPC) officials, who have absolutely no background knowledge of growing international sports requirements and demands.

Measures taken in the recent past have rendered the Pakistan Sports Board (PSB) powerless. It is the ministry that dictates and manages the sports. So much so that a heavy amount of Rs380 million that was only meant for the athletes’ development was surrendered to the Finance Division on the behest of the ministry.

The federations are also making no real efforts to gather private sponsors to help out young athletes like the system evolved by the Pakistan Volleyball Federation (PVF). The PVF is one of the few federations that is making all-out efforts to lure sponsors and invest in junior and senior strings in an effort to earn laurels for the country at the international level.

Arshad Nadeem’s raw talent was even mishandled by the Athletics Federation of Pakistan (AFP). Proper training could have earned him a medal at the Tokyo Olympics as the field at that time was not strong enough. Now the field in javelin has got even tougher and Arshad Nadeem will have to make all-out efforts to earn a medal this time around.