KP Olympic chief offers to hold National Games

KARACHI: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Olympic Association’s (POA) president and former provincial sports minister Syed Aqil Shah on Wednesday said if the 33rd National Games were given to his province he had the ability to organise them in October this year.

“If the POA gives us the 33rd National Games I will organise them in October,” Shah told ‘The News’ in an interview from Peshawar.Shah’s statement about the biennial event came at a time when Balochistan seems unable to hold the country’s biggest spectacle, having struggled for several years.

“I am surprised if KP has the capability to organise such major events then what has happened to the other provinces,” said Shah, also the senior-vice president of Pakistan Olympic Association (POA).

He said that POA should give final warning to Balochistan and should tell them if they were unable to hold them then they would be shifted to some other province.“If Balochistan says that the security issues are hampering its efforts to conduct the competitions then I will tell them that we held the National Games in 2010 at a time when there were bomb blasts everywhere in our province,” Shah said.

“The players are desperately waiting. They have turned rusty. If there are activities the athletes will get the opportunity to showcase their talent and get jobs as they will be picked by different departments. If there are no activities what their future will be,” said Shah, also chairman of the POA Sports Commission.

“It’s really an embarrassing situation that despite spending so many years Balochistan is not in a position to hold the Games,” Shah said. He was quick to add that handling sports was not the job of bureaucrats. “Bureaucrats should be kept away from sports. It’s the job of the federations and POA to hold such events,” he said.

The Games are scheduled in April in Quetta. The other day a POA official told this correspondent that the NOC would soon hold a meeting and would then convene its general council in the first week of March to decide the fate of the National Games.

“When Quaid-e-Azam inaugurated the National Games in 1948 in Karachi its basic purpose was that holding such a big event would enable the federating units to enhance their sports infrastructure which would be utilised for years to come,” said Shah, a former Awami National Party (ANP) senator.

He claimed that after Islamabad, KP had the best sports facilities in the country. “When I was sports minister we built Hayatabad Sports Complex, upgraded the Qayyum Sports Complex and also made state-of-the-art sports facilities in Charsadda and Mardan,” Shah recalled.

Meanwhile, ‘The News’ learnt on Wednesday that the main hall of the PSB Coaching Centre Quetta had developed leakages. “The rain water is trickling down the roof of the main hall of the PSB Coaching Centre. It’s raining heavily here. The provincial government had repaired the hall and had changed its wooden floor but the floor will be affected if the leakage was not stopped,” a source in Quetta said.

The source said if the situation continued, Quetta might lose the right to host the competitions.“Everything has stopped. Both secretary sports and Director General Balochistan Sports Board (BSB) have been transferred. No one is ready to take charge as DG. It’s an alarming situation,” said the source, who is well-connected with the organisers. The Games have been repeatedly postponed because of security and funding issues.