Daily Times

Having grown up during the time when Pakistan hockey team reigned supreme, when the likes of Islahuddin, Samiullah and Shahnaz Sheikh were terrifying for any opposing team’s defence, to say that the current state of affairs of hockey in the country is depressingly pathetic will be an understatement of the highest order.

Much has already been written about the miserable performance by the seven athletes, ostentatiously accompanied by 17 officials, representing Pakistan in the Rio Olympics, so where is the need for more, especially from someone who has always believed that frivolous expenditure is the bane of existence of a developing nation? Indeed, precious resources should only be spent on productive, revenue-generating projects, and definitely, hockey or Olympic sports, on the face of it, rank even below political expediency when it comes to productivity.

At the outset, if sports were a total waste of resources, it would be logical then to assert that the Olympics should have been a thing of the past. Why do so many nations continue to spend taxpayers’ money on their athletes to train them and maintain them, only to compete once every four years? And let us be under no delusion; barring popular sports such as cricket, soccer, tennis and the like, in all other cases the best return on investments in athletes is the probability of a gold medal at the end. And it is not even pure gold. So what is going on?

Well, look at what happens when the Pakistan cricket team beats the Indian team, and that too in India, the entire country rejoices. Rich or poor, lovers of the game distribute sweets, and there is dancing in the streets; every Pakistani, including the rare minority who has no interest in the game, has a feel-good attitude. Someone once joked that the best time for a military takeover would be just when Pakistan cricket team is beating the — well, something that is unprintable — out of the Indians in India.

But that is not even the best part; whenever the above — Pakistan beating India in cricket — happened, those of us who can recall those moments will tell you: We were one. We were all only Pakistanis; we were not Baloch, Pathan, Sindhi, mohajir, Punjabi or anything else, we were purely Pakistanis hugging and congratulating each other with broad grins on our faces and offering sweets to anyone we met. That, dear readers, is what politicians cannot do; what everybody else fails at doing, only sports can accomplish.

I don’t even want to go into the health part debate. Sports are the combined passion of the nation to see your team compete, the elation and ubiquitous national joy when the team wins, the pride when the national anthem is played as your team takes the gold at the podium, and the height of patriotism when the team comes home with the trophy or the medal. If you look at it in this manner, it is very easy to conclude that in our case — a nation torn by conflict between ethnic groups — budgets for preparing national teams in selected sports should take the backseat only to education, health care and defence.

What have we achieved in sports over the last two decades? Lost our cricket crown, lost the squash crown, destroyed the hockey team, and buried wrestling forever. How many of us know that till date the ‘Great Gama’, the grandfather of our first lady, is the only wrestler in the history of the world who was never defeated by anyone? Honestly, our young people probably don’t even know about him. It is said that he was Bruce Lee’s inspiration, and legend has it that when he travelled to England to challenge western wrestlers, nobody dared to take the challenge.

So having established that we need to invest in sports, the logical next question is does it make a difference? The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, employing a method developed by their professors, have been rather accurately predicting Olympic medals tally for more than 10 years. Reportedly, they predicted the medal count for the London Olympics with 98 percent accuracy, and as far as I can tell, they did a pretty good job of predicting the Rio Olympic medals. Curiously, the methodology applied has nothing to do with sports or related knowledge, and is purely based on a country’s population, level of wealth, past performances and whether it is hosting the games or not. In the case of Pakistan, we can ignore the last two parameters, but if the Caribbean Island nation of Grenada with a population of less than 250,000 and a GDP of only 1.4 billion dollars can win a silver medal, we must have been an exception to the rule for the Tuck model.

So apparently, economics makes a difference to winning or losing in Olympics. But the sceptics will insist that correlation cannot be deemed as causation, which is probably true. The question is has this been done before? Well, according to a recent article in The Economist, the British did it: “UK sports has been more active in picking potential winners and showering them with resources.”

The British, for over more than a decade, have apparently increased the funding for their athletes; it surely helps when you are a developed nation and are rich. Irrespective, so did it pay off? Look at the medal standings for the Rio Olympics 2016, Great Britain are second, behind the United States of America.

In conclusion, the intelligentsia must take up the cause of sports in the country at all levels, aggressively. All that is being written and all the criticism is still not enough; the government remains inactive beyond lip service. It has always fascinated me how quickly the electronic media gets bored with the real issues facing the nation, and only relishes scandals and drama. Nonetheless, government needs to be nudged in any manner that works to focus on the next Olympics. Obviously, we don’t have the resources to fund each and every sport, so let us be selective, and let’s focus on hockey and athletics as a start, and perhaps squash too. Let us play to win.

The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad, and can be reached at syed.bakhtiyarkazmi@gmail.com