Hosting National Games a distant dream for Himachal

Uttarakhand will host the National Games for the first time later this month. For the small hill state, raising a national-level infrastructure to conduct the biggest multi-sport event of the country is a big feat. Thousands of athletes and coaches will fight it out to win medals in 32 different sporting events at the Games.

For the sports lovers of Himachal Pradesh, the Games will throw up one big question — if Uttarakhand can do it, can Himachal Pradesh also host the Games in near future? The answer, unfortunately, is a big no. Forget National Games, the state can’t host even the national-level competitions of most Olympic sports. The biggest hurdle in the way of the state hosting any big-ticket sporting event is the lack of sporting infrastructure.

“The states hosting the National Games have already been chosen for the next few editions. A Memorandum of Understanding is signed between the state and Indian Olympic Association for hosting the Games. Unfortunately, I do not see the state hosting National Games for a long time to come as there’s hardly any sporting infrastructure,” said Rajesh Bhandari, general secretary of the Himachal Pradesh Olympic Association. “And whatever little infrastructure we have, it’s not fit to host the Nationals or National Games,” Bhandari added.

Most people involved in running sports in the state agree with Bhandari. According to them, there’s not even a single multi-purpose indoor stadium in the state where the Nationals of Olympic sports such as boxing, wrestling, badminton, weightlifting, etc, could be conducted. And a few national-level competitions that had been hosted by the state in the last few years were held in a makeshift facility - the Boxing Nationals were conducted in a tented facility, school national shooting was held on the premises of a private hotel near Kufri. And a few other national level events were conducted on the premises of some private schools.

The sports community blames successive governments over the decades for such a bleak sporting scenario in the state. It takes a lot of time, effort and resources to create a good sporting infrastructure but the governments have not made enough efforts. The current government has taken some steps to improve the sporting ecosystem, the biggest being a massive rise in case awards. Now, the cash awards offered by the state for winning medals in big events like Olympics, Asian Games and Commonwealth Games are among the highest in the country.

Recently, para athlete Nishad Kumar walked away with a cash award of Rs 7.8 crore for his silver medals at the Tokyo and the Paris Paralympics. The big reward would have inspired hundreds of children to take up sports seriously. Besides, the diet money for sportspersons at school, district and state level has seen a three-fold increase.

An indoor multipurpose sports stadium is coming up at Nadaun, but it remains to be seen if the facility would be good enough to host the national-level events.

Besides physical infrastructure, there’s a big shortage of coaches. Around 50 per cent of the sanctioned posts are vacant and junior coaches are functioning as District Sports Officers in most districts. Also, there’s little coordination between the sports wings of the education department and the sports department. All these factors are keeping the state and its sportspersons from excelling in the sporting world.

“For producing top sportspersons, we need to host top sporting events on and off. It will help in developing sports culture as young children would get inspired to take up sports when they will see top athletes in action. But this could happen only if there's good infrastructure,” said Bhandari, pointing out the fundamental problem sports is facing in the state.