Daily Times

When Pakistan emerged on the map of the world in 1947, its athletes soon started showing their muscles in the Asian and world arenas. Sports, perhaps, became the only bearer of good news in Pakistan. Starting from the early years, the likes of Abdul Khaliq in athletics, squash legend Hashim Khan, the cricketers and the hockey team gave the country an identity at the international level. Olympic conquests, World Cup-winning triumphs in hockey, cricket, squash and even snooker, Pakistan almost always punched above its weights in the field of sports. Between 1982 and 1997, first Jahangir Khan and then Jansher Khan won every British Open, the premier tournament in the world game. Pakistanis in squash, the toughest of racket games, looked invincible. But the last two decades have been a different story altogether. Pakistan won their last Olympic medal in Barcelona Olympics in 1992, Cricket World Cup in 1992 and Hockey World Cup in 1994. There have been successes like the 2009 World Twenty20 title and ICC Champions Trophy 2017 triumph, but such victories have been few and far between. Over the years, not one, not two but almost all sports have experienced a sharp slump in our country. It goes beyond misfortune and carelessness and instead appears to be a trend. Since 1997, five years after Pakistan’s last Olympic medal in any sport, Pakistan’s superiority in squash is no more. Like the Olympics and hockey, squash has nothing to showcase since the 1990s. Despite all this, Pakistanis love sports.

Anybody outside the country who spent time watching the last Olympic Games – Rio Olympics 2016 – might not realise that sports are played in Pakistan. The sum total of Pakistan’s Olympic achievement since 1947 is ten medals. Eight in hockey, including three golds, one each in wrestling and boxing. Pakistan haven’t won a medal for 24 years. Worse, Pakistan is the most populous nation to fail to win a medal in Rio. This isn’t the performance of a country that values sports. Most of us would have already forgotten the athletes who represented Pakistan at the Rio Olympics. The country was represented by seven athletes, who competed in the qualification phases of their respective events and none of them went beyond this stage and neither did they look close to competing with their highly skilled, trained and battle-hardened opponents.

We are watching the media and some impassioned followers ruing the shambolic state of sports in the country and the general apathy of the government towards this area but this anguish will remain shortlived. Rio 2016 was no different from London 2012, Beijing 2008 or any of the preceding Olympics going back to Atlanta 1996, with Pakistan returning empty-handed from each of the last six Games. Each time, there had been a hue and cry over the dismal state of affairs but the fact is that Pakistan continue to nosedive further as time passes and one isn’t even sure if they have hit their lowest point yet. Currently, it is a struggle largely due to bad governance. Therefore, elimination of political influence from sports is as important as improving the health, education and various other sectors.

Pakistan has a Sports Ministry, better known as the Pakistan Sports Board (PSB). After the devolution of the PSB in 2011, the administrative control of the PSB was transferred to the Ministry of Inter-Provincial Coordination. But the PSB, along with the IPC Ministry, is still running the show and the devolution of sports to provinces has been nothing less than a great farce. It is interesting to note that the PSB was embroiled in conflict for much of the last four years with the Pakistan Olympic Association (POA), which meant that rather than focusing on the provision of requisite facilities and infrastructure for the athletes, energy was spent on scheming for power and clout locally and internationally.

The reasons for sports decline in Pakistan are numerous. While cricket remains hugely popular, all other sports have seen a big deterioration in the past two decades. The main being the government paying almost no attention to nurturing talented players and providing them sporting facilities and guidance. Perhaps the biggest cause for the extraordinary decline in sports in Pakistan is a lack of funding and vision.

In the beginning it seems that sporting success for Pakistan was heaven-sent. A country with little or no sporting infrastructure quickly rose as a force to be reckoned with in a variety of sports and that too at the world level. Almost all of the top national sportsmen were, more or less, self-made. Their success made us over-confident to the point that we thought it was our birthright to excel at the world level. That is one of the reasons why we failed to develop a single world-class sports academy despite the fact that Pakistan considers itself to be a sports-mad nation.

The sports authorities have always ignored the fact that the change of command in no way promises success, long-term planning does. But we are not a nation of sage souls. Rather we indulge in thoughtless decisions. Unfortunately, the technical understanding of issues has always been ignored, and it has triggered a rot.

In games other than cricket, unless an individual tackles all the impediments and becomes successful on his/her own strength, he/she doesn’t get any recognition. This is a major drawback in Pakistan sports. Examples can be given of our tennis and boxing stars Aisamul Haq Qureshi and Mohammad Waseem. We have also failed to understand the fact that over the years sports have advanced to a different level in many parts of the world. The rules of the games have changed tremendously. In the past, sports were an art, today they are pure science. Today we are trying to win a war with bows and arrows while many of our opponents are equipped with the latest gadgetry. Most importantly, we have ignored the mother of all sports – athletics. We follow cricket, cricket and more cricket. But we have ignored athletics at our own peril. Without producing fit and fast athletes we cannot excel in many of the sports we love and that includes cricket.

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 competitors 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. The insistence of Pakistani parents on making their children doctors, engineers, civil servants, businessmen or IT specialists is one of the reasons why Pakistan does not produce world class sportspersons.

Governments all over the world keep sports and education as their top priority, build infrastructure, hold talent development programmes for players and promote medical sciences in sports to compete the world of sports. India spend billions of dollars on sports, but in Pakistan it is totally opposite because sports are not our priority. Patronising only cricket and ignoring other sports is very unfair. Cricket does not have the kind of global competition that others sports have as its playing is limited to a handful of largely Commonwealth countries.

It is lamentable that both in the national sphere and the sporting arena the root of our dilemma is the notorious system of patronage and imposed cronies, to the exclusion of merit and professionalism. Under the powerful patron’s benevolent gaze, the pick and choose appointees can survive scandals and failures that would crush an ordinary mortal. To rise from nothing, against all adversity, and reach the pinnacle, that is a dream that is as powerful today as it has ever been. More than any other sporting occasion, the Olympics denote a country’s progress or the lack of it. Olympians are marked by their heroics, their endeavour, their struggle against the odds. Pakistan has no Olympian of note for our present generation. The dismal state of sports affairs at the 70th anniversary of the country should be a wake-up call for the government, and the country’s sporting authorities.

Published in Daily Times, August 15^th 2017.