The 2016 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, will commence on August 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A record number of countries are participating in a record number of sports. More than 10,500 athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees (NOCs), including first time entrants Kosovo and South Sudan, are scheduled to take part in the mega event. With 306 sets of medals, the Summer Games will feature 28 Olympic sports, including rugby sevens and golf, which were added by the International Olympic Committee in 2009. These sporting events will take place at 33 venues in the host city, and at five venues in the cities of São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Brasília (Brazil’s capital), and Manaus. These will be the first Summer Olympic Games under the IOC presidency of Thomas Bach. Rio will become the first South American city to host the Summer Olympics. These will be the first games to be held in a Portuguese-speaking country. Pakistan is also scheduled to compete at the 2016 Summer Olympics that concludes on August 21. Although Pakistan boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to political reasons, but since 1948, Pakistan is a regular participant at the Olympics. Pakistan had a decent participation in the 2012 London Olympics, but it is unfortunate that for the first time in the history of Pakistan sports, national hockey team has failed to qualify for the Olympics. Apart from seven wild card entries, no athlete from Pakistan — a nation of almost 200 million people — is participating in the upcoming Olympics. Many Pakistanis find it embarrassing that for the first time in the nation’s sporting history not a single Pakistani athlete has qualified to participate in the Olympics. The wild card athletes are taking part in judo, swimming and shooting competitions. The seven athletes have no chance of winning medals. They are more or less going for the participation and gaining the experience. Pakistan is a sports-loving nation that once prided itself on producing extraordinary athletes, mostly in the game of hockey and squash. The country’s hockey team, which won various Olympic medals in the 1980s and 1990s, has not performed well for the last many years. Out of ten Olympic medals Pakistan had won between 1948 and 2012, the hockey team had secured eight. Equally disappointing is the state of squash in Pakistan. Once a hugely successful sport in the South Asian country, which produced legendary players like Jahangir Khan and Jansher Khan, there is not a single player now who can reach the same heights. While cricket remains hugely popular, all other sports have seen a big decline in the past two decades. The reason, some experts say, is the corporatisation of sports in Pakistan, with government paying almost no attention to nurturing talented players and providing them sporting facilities and guidance. Perhaps the biggest reason for the extraordinary decline in sports in Pakistan is a lack of funding and vision. Pakistan’s sports budget is the lowest in South Asia, less than that of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and even Afghanistan. Government officials and private sector are not interested in investing in anything other than cricket. In dilapidated gyms and crumbling sports fields, Pakistani athletes lament the outdated equipment and obsolete training methods, which leave them struggling against foreign competetiors who adhere to latest science-based techniques. National sports federations cannot afford to hire good coaches who are familiar with modern training techniques. Athletes are truly frustrated because mostly coaches are not literate, and they have been teaching what they taught 30 years back. Without infrastructure a lot can be done, but without techniques no one can win. For women athletes, the conditions are even worse. They are not allowed to train outdoors, and there is hardly any familial support for talented young girls. It is said that societal barriers are coming down for women, but many women athletes don’t agree with that. Most young girls in the deeply conservative Muslim nation are pressured by their families to stop playing sports, while those with family backing face the wrath of their communities. The grassroots system is almost non-existent, children in schools rarely play a sport that is not cricket, and top athletes seldom compete against the world’s best as cash-strapped federations cannot afford to send them abroad. No Pakistani athlete has qualified to Rio Olympics should be a wake-up call for the government, and the country’s sporting authorities. We should start preparing for the 2020 Olympics at the earliest to inculcate a spirit of healthy comeptition and team spirit in our atheletes, and to earn respect in the comity of nations. *