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Continuing the good work
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When summer sports camps wrap up, young talent has no opportunity to hone its skills, writes Abhijit Sen Gupta
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CATCH 'EM YOUNG: What is required is sustained, result-oriented training. - PHOTO: P.S. SIVAKUMAR
Well begun but half done. That just about sums up the tale of coaching camps which sprout during summer, only to wrap up quietly when the schools reopen. Most do a good job of polishing the skills of budding sportspersons, but don't quite follow up with a post-training routine. The exceptions are in cricket and tennis, where some academies provide year-round coaching.
So even as lots of boys and girls get the basics right in these camps, only a handful make it into the competitive level and fewer still emerge champs. No wonder we keep hearing the refrain of how a country of a billion cannot bag the elusive gold medals at elite events such as the Olympics.
With the current scene, most parents consider summer camps as a way to rid themselves of the nuisance value of having their hyper brats around. And most kids think of sports as a short burst of activity to be indulged in every summer before getting back to books and classrooms. Academic pressure too leaves them with little time for any kind of physical activity. All this ultimately means that follow-up and continuity in sports are nil. There are very few schemes where training is imparted throughout the year. The contact with sports is too brief to be of any real benefit which means that even if some children have talent, they don't have the time or scope to develop it.
Even the lucky ones who made it to the top — Mukesh Kumar, P. Gopichand, Gagan Narang and Sania Mirza to name a few — had to struggle very hard in the initial stages. They not only faced the task of finding a capable full-time coach but also had to carefully plan their schedules and scout for financial support.
According to Ankush V. Giriraj, who counts among the most qualified gymnastics coaches in the country: "Sports such as gymnastics cannot be mastered by occasional training sessions. A gymnast must fashion his life around the sport and practise for several hours every day in order to gain mastery over the techniques."
Juan Giha of Peru, a six-time Olympian who is now guiding shooter Amit Sanghi, observes that shooters in Europe are never out of touch. "Besides daily practice, they have 10-12 competitions every year while in India not even half that number are held." He also points out that in India, shooters are also forced to divide their time between education, job and the sport.
In many European countries, however, there are professionals who concentrate only on their sport.
Unfortunately in India, a fully professional set-up that could enable a sportsperson to earn a living through sports does not exist. This discourages parents and children from considering sports as a career option. Yet, despite all these drawbacks, our sportspersons are always expected to succeed at international competitions — where they have to compete against rivals who are products of a far better planned, better financed and totally result-oriented sports system which has nurtured them right from childhood.
If a handful of Indian sportspersons have achieved success at the international level, then they deserve more credit than their counterparts from the U.S., China or Japan. For, in their formative years, Indian players have had to overcome several major handicaps such as absence of long-term coaching, paucity of funds and public apathy.
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