Pakistan sports chief sees little hopes of medal in London

KARACHI - More than six years after launching a multi-million-rupee campaign to groom future champions, Pakistan Olympic Association (POA) President Arif Hasan has conceded that the country has little or no hope of winning an Olympic medal in 2012 in London.

Hasan said that Pakistan’s slim hopes of winning a medal in the 2010 London Olympics are pinned on hockey — the sport that fetched the country all its four gold medals.

Back in 2003, Hasan launched a countrywide campaign to find and train future Olympic heroes and pumped in hundreds of millions of rupees into the project that was funded by the government and a lottery scheme. A new organisation under the banner of Pakistan Sports Trust (PST) was launched.

However, the standard of sports only worsened during Hasan’s tenure. Pakistan failed to even come close to winning a medal in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and fared even poorly in the 2008 Olympiad in Beijing.

Things look gloomy for Pakistan ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games in London as there are little hopes of many sports persons qualifying for the quadrennial spectacle.

Pakistan hockey is also in a bad shape. The national team will have to go through qualifiers for the World Cup for the first time. Such is the state of the country’s hockey, that there are fears the record four-time world champions might not even qualify for the event to be held in Delhi from Feb 28-March 13.

However, Hasan believes that with proper steps, Pakistan hockey team can win a medal in London.

The POA President who also heads the PST said that hockey has always been the country’s hope in spite of the fact that the national team has not won a medal since clinching a bronze in Barcelona in 1992.

“Sports in Pakistan have been on gradual decline and we have not progressed as the rest of the world has. Their coaching and approach towards sports have become more scientific while we have done little about it, he lamented.