Asian Games: balancing the contingent

LAHORE: Some hope for the sports horizon rose higher in January this year at a detailed press conference. The Pakistan Olympic Association said that coaches would accompany teams going to the Asian Games being held in August this year.

“The federations will send the CVs of the coaches to ascertain their eligibility. This is to eliminate the practice of favouritism and jeopardising the rights of those who work with the athletes throughout the training but at the end are dropped,” POA Secretary Haji Khalid Mehmood told pressmen at the time. His comments followed a meeting between POA Chief (Retd) Lt. Gen. Arif Hasan and the president and secretaries of the national sports federation.

At around the same time the POA, with the federations, had, following the Olympic Agenda 2020, initiated a programme to safeguard athletes from harassment and abuse in sports. This of course is particularly important in Pakistan where there have been periodical allegations, notably involving female cricketers in 2013 and hockey players in late 2017. While the online courses on awareness were completed by at least some federations, the issue of dispatching coaches alongside teams remains something all federations simply do not recognize as important. The tradition of sending ‘favourites’ on tours is of course a long established one.

The Pakistan Athletics Federation will be dispatching an experienced coach and an official of the federation Asghar Ali Gill along with his squad to Jakarta. Gill has in the past coached Pakistan’s top athletes including Naseem Hameed, the girl from Lyari who stunned the world by winning the 100m gold at the 2010 South Asian Games in Dhaka. She says ‘coaches are vital to the success of any athlete and at meets they can encourage and support.’

The Pakistan Swimming Federation does not appear to have made up its mind however on how important good coach is for a national squad. Other federations may too opt to set out without a qualified coach. This is a matter which needs to be discussed at the upcoming meetings between the POA, PSF and federations. According to available reports, the officials included in the swimming contingent do not include a coach who has, as POA suggest, worked with national level players over a period of time and owns the requisite qualifications.

Commenting on this to The News, John Leonard, Executive Director of the American Swim Coaches Association, said ““NO successful sporting nation would send a team of athletes ANYWHERE without a swimming coach. This is simple fact demonstrated on deck by every team with an athlete on the Podium.”

Backing Leonard’s opinion, FINA coach Miguel Lopez, who heads the FINA excellence programme in Phuket told this publication in Thanyapura “The support of a coach is extremely important. Without the coach going to a meet there is much higher chance of failure, disappointment and even swimmers abandoning the sport.” He added “not sending a coach to a major meet is, simply put, nonsense”.

The football and baseball federations seem set to dispatch coaches as would be the case with most other team sports. The boxing federation, also running an individual sport, will also be dispatching a coach according to reports available to this newspaper so far as will weightlifting and wrestling – though names and qualifications are still to be confirmed.

A former Pakistani athlete who ran 400m at international events for his country prior to 2000 told The News “it is hard for anyone involved in competitive sport to even imagine managing without a coach. This is especially difficult for inexperienced Pakistani athletes.”

While the Pakistan Olympic Association, the PSB and the federations will no doubt be sorting out the problem, there are also bigger problems. Sports is not a priority in Pakistan. Financial constraints could force a cut in the size of the contingent which currently stands at 397 members, with unaffiliated federations paying for themselves. It is hoped that in the cuts coaches and naturally athletes will be put in first place behind officials who often treat even the most important international meets only as pleasure ride.