Changing batons and the art of bickering

There came a huge controversy when Lankan’s sprint queen Susanthika Jayasinghe refused to change baton with the assigned athlete in Doha and thus chaos followed and finally the country lost a medal that they could have easily won. Now come on…are you surprised? Anyway it has become a way of life in Sri Lanka. Come politics, sports or any other blessed thing people who follow their predecessors forget to carry on playing the tune and suffers in billions of rupees when it comes to politics and medals and matches when it comes to Sports. Even in general life we are better at bickering rather than a “and they lived happily ever-after” ending.

The following little chat with national athletic coach Lakshman de Alwis just unfolds another episode of how good we at doing the bad thing.

After the Doha debacle we at the Musings met up the Lankan national athletic coach Lakshman de Alwis just not to ask what happened at Doha, but to ask him how this decline has come upon in athletics and how much of the blame he is willing to take on the present status-quo of athletics.

As expected de Alwis refused to become a part of it and said that in spite of being the national coach he was a kind of a victim of circumstances. He explained “No I am not willing to take the blame for the present decline in athletics and to give strength to that statement I have to to give an insight of out coaching system that derived from 1984 onwards and what followed suit.

“In 1984 I was the national coach and was in charge of training and also was the resource officer of the ministry of sport, the then minister of sport was Vincent Perera. There we had a project to develop athletics. Here our aim was to project ourselves winning medals at the inaugural South Asian Federation Games that was held in Katmandu. Under this project, we chose 16 coaches who all also had had training overseas and they were dispatched to 16 respective districts and thus with the results drawn from the national meets and championships we formed a national pool which consisted about one hundred athletes with very good potential.

“The effort in Katmandu was very encouraging as we came back with eleven medals. This gave us the impetus to go ahead with our project in full gear, and by the time we reached the Hiroshima Games in 1994, we had Dharsha, Susanthika and Dhammika Menike performing in the country line-up.

“This was the time when S.B. Dissanayake was the minister of sport. Ironically at this time I had to leave the job of the National Coach over some flimsy issue and take up the same post in Brunei. Before I left, I compiled a full report on the development of a second string as we already had a host of first level performers who were doing well. However after I left the programme was changed and up to year 2000 our athletic officialdom concentrated on a few athletes while providing them with various facilities the development of the second string was forgotten.

However by this time eleven athletes had achieved the IAAF stipulated standards all this was because of the programme we launched in 1985. By this time we had won medals in the world championship and the Olympics. At this time had we a second string training with the top athletes and up grading their levels, we would have been on a better footing athletic wise now.

“In 2002 I came back to Sri Lanka and Johnston Fernando who was the Sports Minister at that time invited me to join the band wagon again. By this time there were a lot of controversies among the top athletes and handling them had become difficult. However I managed to get around Susanthika, Nimmi, Kulawansa etc and train them. By this time our relay teams were among the top six. The men’s team was ranked no 4 and women’s team was ranked No 6 in the world.

“In 2002 I became the national coach and I started pushing my programme once again. However by this time our athletics had got into two significant camps and I was Mr. in between. Some of them like Susanthika left the camps and took up training under me while the others continued the same once again as a result of this factionalism the second string fell by the wayside.

Then the national coach Lakshman de Alwis said that to put our athletics or moreover the entire sports in order Sri Lanka must moot a national sports policy which should be one that could not be changed by individuals or interested parties so that who ever is in power will have to work within one frame work which is within the interests of the country.

De Alwis pointed out “first the SAF games programme came and we started training, and suddenly once it was postponed money for training ran dry. The traning programme was systematic. Now if we had a facility to house 70 athletes in Colombo and train together we may have done better. When athletes are training in their own environment we here in Colombo have no control over their regime. At the same time our sports medicine set up also should be upgraded and the equipment properly maintained.

Finally he pointed out that the poor performance even in Doha was a direct result of the ad-hoc manner in which the whole wagon wheel was turning. At the same time he also added a word of caution by hinting that if Sri Lanka does not get things under a proper plan and a programme we are heading for a very bleak future, sportswise.