Who is responsible for athletes attaining High Performance: NOC, ministry or associations?
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Sri Lanka topped the athletics medal tally at SAG with 15 golds - Pic courtesy Sameera Peiris
The National Olympic Committee (NOC) of Sri Lanka seem to be at odds not only with the Ministry of Sports but does not see eye-to-eye with the Athletics Association of Sri Lanka (AASL) when it comes to attaining high performance.
The NOC Secretary General Maxwell de Silva unveiled plans to focus on high performance training for selected sports and deserving athletes leading up to the 2022 Asian Games and Commonwealth Games while its president Suresh Subramanium wanted to give credit to his ‘team’ in the NOC for reaping a harvest of medals at the 13th South Asian Games (SAG) amid many obstacles.
Notwithstanding the fact that SAG is the lowest tier of competition in the region, the NOC were unashamedly keen to savour the glory at the expense of the Sports Ministry and even the National Sports Associations.
NOC vice president Asanga Seneviratne, a former national rugby star and cricketer, virtually took the bull by the horns saying they are not a post office to rubber stamp the participation of athletes at international events.
“The NOC until I think 2018 didn’t have a High Performance unit. Since then, we have had a High Performance unit and we have been funding 40 top athletes in different sports namely athletics, swimming, wrestling, judo, and karate, to name a few. We actually look after the welfare of all our top athletes in the country. Other than the 40 that we are supporting, we support many other athletes, many other federations from our personal funds as well as finding sponsors. So the NOC is very proactive in supporting sport in this country,” he explained at a press conference.
“Since I took over as chairman we have signed up with Asiri (Hospitals). We are about to sign up with SriLankan airlines. We have an agreement with MAS Holdings. We have approached John Keells Holdings, Dialog, Mobitel and many other corporates. We have drawn up marketing plans and each HP athlete who we have in this country has been featured. We are actually doing a lot of work here to get our elite athletes into high performance. Unfortunately, the Sports Ministry, the NOC and the federations are not working together. That is the biggest problem we have here,” lamented Seneviratne who seems to have taken upon himself the task of raising the profile of sports and sports stars in the country.
But is developing and improving the standard of athletes the NOC’s job?
“The NOC does not play a role in High Performance training. Funding athletes is not high performance. It is not about giving 100 dollars or paying monthly salaries. High performance is identifying elite athletes and sending them for training overseas where there are centres to achieve excellence,” said a leading AASL official.
“They talk about High Performance but does anyone know the meaning of high performance,” he asked.
“It was the AASL who took the initiative to send two javelin throwers Nadeeka Lakmali and Sachith Maduranga for training in Finland with government funding. Their performances improved by leaps and bounds thereafter, winning silver medals at the Asian Athletic Championships held in Pune, India in 2013,” he said.
Maduranga threw a distance of 79.62 metres, the best by a male athlete at the time while Beijing Olympian Lakmali who threw distances of over 60m consistently, became the first woman after Susanthika Jayasinghe to qualify for the final round of the IAAF World Athletic Championship and be ranked 12th in the world.
The AASL official said Sri Lanka had a real chance of winning medals at the Asian Games if not the Commonwealth Games where most of the top athletic nations apart from USA will be competing.
“Sarangi de Silva and Vidusha Lakshani (long jump) and Gratian Dhananjaya and Safreen Ahmed are the future medals prospects. They can improve like Lakmali and Maduranga if they are sent to Cologne, Germany for high performance training. We can definitely win medals at the Asian Games. We can win only in technical events or relay,” said the athletic expert who emphasized the need to send them for training overseas.
“We don’t have a high performance training centre here, so we should send elite athletes for training overseas. It will be a huge achievement even if we win a few medals at the Asian Games. We must give scholarship to athletes. For that we have to start now because we have untrained coaches here. The other problem is they (athletes) don’t want to part with their old coaches,” he added.
“Also, there is no point giving salaries of 40,000 or doling out money. If you give money for training, it’s very good because they are poor people. But there should be some tag line behind it. We must set them targets to achieve,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether the NOC is on the same page with the AASL when it comes to High Performance though Sri Lanka’s Olympic legend Susanthika Jayasinghe was appointed Director of the High Performance unit at NOC.
“We plan on trying to work with the sports ministry. We do not want to have any confrontations with anybody because that’s not in the interest of the athlete. The athlete is supreme. We need to support each athlete and the NOC is there to do that,” assured Seneviratne.
“The NOC will do everything in its power to help athletes achieve greatness. That’s what we want to do from the point of this NOC. I am ashamed to say I am doing High Performance. What I am trying to do is find adequate or some form of finance to help these children live day to day. High performance means giving proper accommodation, food, transport and also many countries that do high performance look after families of athletes. You can’t just look after the athletes. If the parents or siblings are in poverty, the mindset is not going to be there,” he said.
“I know we can’t sort all these things at once. From the NOC’s point of view what we are doing is trying to somehow supplement. The support we are getting is very little. When you are talking of High Performance what we want to do now is to take the results of the SAF Games (SAG), compare it to regional timings and what not, and then try and support these athletes to get to the next level with proper overseas training, proper competition, proper nutrition, and accommodation. This is a big programme. We are trying our best. The committee is committed to raise money and supporting the athletes to the best of our ability but the key here is the sports ministry,” he explained.
“You can’t eliminate high performance and develop sport in a country. There is a lot more to sport than cricket. We have 33 sports. We have great athletes. You can see their profiles. They are very marketable But we need to work together with the sports ministry,” he said making a passionate plea for unity.