Pakistan needs a viable strategy to promote its athletes. Cricket attracts the most amount of private sector sponsorships. Hockey is only followed by a handful. Other sports including badminton, squash, billiards, swimming, volleyball, chess, javelin, shooting, sprinting, cycling, archery, artistic gymnastics, basketball, football, diving, judo, karate, rowing, weightlifting, taekwondo, tennis and table tennis must be promoted in Pakistan.
There is a multi-tier problem in this regard. Athletes do not learn about playing a sport in a week. They need continuous training. This training includes building stamina and physique, developing temperament and perseverance, enhancing reflex actions and endurance. Athletes need to develop skills relating to the cognitive and physical aspects. The ability to play according to the rules and to keep an eye on the competitor is part of cognition. To perform at the best of one’s ability, and to endure the stress and pain is the physical part.
The Pakistan Sports Board needs to prepare an operational and strategic vision to promote sports in Pakistan. It must entail how it will select players interested in playing various sports and how to train them. A holistic strategy must be implemented with various stakeholders connected. At the highest level, the Pakistan Sports Board must devise a plan to identify talent (players) at the school, college, and university levels. It should create sub-committees to facilitate this plan. A sub-committee of “Assessors” should be formed to identify and scrutinise sports talent. Assessors can hold trials in villages, cities, schools, colleges, universities, local clubs, etc. Once the talent is identified, it needs to be trained. A sub-committee of “trainers” will facilitate the training—cognitive and physical. The sub-committee of “evaluators” will judge the talent’s performance. The talent will participate in local and national sports tournaments, a sort of mini-Olympics, hosted by the concerned governing bodies of sports as assigned by the Pakistan Sports Board, at the local and national levels. The talent’s play, technique, strategy, style, and other aspects will be meticulously judged during such tournaments. A sub-committee of “builders” will develop sports infrastructure where the talent can train and practice.
Each sub-committee will be monitored by the Pakistan Sports Board. The sub-committees will present the Board a bi-annual or a quarterly progress report for timely feedback, evaluation, and for changes in talent hunt, training, infrastructure, other aspects, as and when required. In case the talent comprises students, prior permission from their parents/custodian along with teachers should be taken. The talent would need to follow a timetable and adjust their time accordingly for studies and family time.
A major question for sports development in Pakistan pertains to “do we have the sports infrastructure?” Owning a swimming pool, using sports equipment and wearable gear are still considered to be the hobbies of the rich. This mindset needs to be changed. The Pakistan Sports Board should invest in sporting gear and develop infrastructure. Until there is no infrastructure, aspiring athletes will continue to train themselves in school backyards and open compounds as was the case with 2021 Olympians, Talha Talib and Arshad Nadeem. We may never know how many aspiring talents we have lost for not having the resources to perform at the national and international levels. Until the governing bodies do not endeavour to develop and promote sports in Pakistan, our athletes will continue to return from the Olympics without medals. The objective must be to improve our sports training and infrastructure. Medals will become a byproduct of the athletes’ efforts.
Muhammad Omar Iftikhar
The writer is a Karachi-based author, columnist, and fiction writer. He tweets
@omariftikhar