COVID funds aplenty for sports! Is it blessing in disguise or a charm display!
View(s):
FFSL officials making their contribution to the COVID-19 Fund
Reports of funds for sportsmen from premier global sport organisations is praiseworthy! Unlike the superstars of the world’s most prosperous sports with multi-billion dollar budgets and pay-cheques, most Asian and local sportsmen are not in that cozy framework.
The world’s superstars have made magnanimous overtures and very generous donations to support national programmes supporting needy sections of their populace including sportsmen and sportswomen across the globe. So a trickledown effect into the poorer nations is not altogether surprising. That it will benefit deserving athletes to maintain their fitness and enthusiasm till such time the pandemic abates, is a blessing few could deny and a rainbow that portrays how sports is such a unifying force even in the worst of times!
Cricket and football have lavishly spread the funds far and wide, even making appeticing grants to the National COVID fundraiser. In a looming election period for local football, one can see the fancy footwork on social media that takes one’s breath away. From Point Pedro to Dondra, the money machine is at work, garlands and all, paying homage to the liberal donors at Torrington. No worries, FIFA and its younger brother AFC are past masters at that. One only hopes that the poor footballer has benefitted.
Cricket, not to be outdone came up with the Homagama pipedream which fortuitously, Sri Lanka’s super star cricketers of yesteryear belted out of the ground with the help of influential offspring who would rather festoon the scrums in Rugby! Most other sports could raise more than a whimper with the MOS exhorting NSAs to offer an allowance to needy sportsperson as well as coaches and other officials who were suddenly bereft of income or sustenance. With the constant lament that the Treasury has not released funds, the MOS exhorts but can do little else. The NOC chipped in with their own cash silos from heavens away to succour those who had fallen by the wayside!
With most sports arenas shut, athletes were left to parade at home converting their living rooms to makeshift gyms or stepping out into their home gardens or neighbourhood fields to keep fit and ready to tango when the time came! Cricket as usual set the standard by opting for a quarantined training in style from a base at Shangri-La in Hambantota. Football is settling down to a camp at the Baddegana Training Centre which no doubt the national pool will cheer. Some of the other Sports Associations are all getting set to bounce back with international engagements in sight including the deferred Olympic Games.
While all this is taking shape challenging the COVID onslaught, sections of the media reported about the MOS Commission of Enquiry into the last South Asian Games. Three other committees have now been appointed to go into each of the discrepancies highlighted, which underlines the often quoted malady, that if you want to delay something, simply appoint a committee to look into it, an art perfected by the highest in the land.
Everyone knows that the tug-of-war between the MOS and the NOC created more drama than the games itself and this column in a previous article, highlighted the opportunity to create a New-Norm in National Sports Administration by considering the formation of an apex body that followed the PPP principles; Government and Private Sector working in unison. That probably is too much to digest for the men at the top of each pyramid. Or perhaps it’s too much to ask of our sports legislators. Or there is even the likelihood that many would submit the argument of independence, not of interdependence! What is important to realise is that COVID does not discriminate! What it does is to level the playing field and impose the trickle-down effect of passing on some benefits to the have-nots!