Sri Lankaka Club Symposium - Bahrain Toastmaster Magazine Vol 07 | Page 6
Tragic Story of Sri Lankan Sports
Wining is the ultimate goal of most of us. Losing is the painful experience. Nobody likes to end as a loser in any competition, be it as an individual or as a team. But unfortunately as a sports loving country, nowadays, we are experiencing losing trend in many sports. Dear Toastmasters can I ask you a question? What is the most important thing in sports? In any sports, the trophies & medals are the most important things. End of the day, it will show to the world if we are successful or not. It is not necessary to win all games but it is embarrassing to lose the final after a winning streak. It now happens as a habit in Sri Lankan sports. Just one month before we saw our champion badminton player Niluka Karunanayaka losing his championship match to lower ranked player in Bahrain. As Sri Lankans in Bahrain we lost a golden opportunity to fly our flag high at this tournament. If we go through down the memory lane, there is lot of heart braking moments, ? 2003 CWC in West Indies vs Australia ? 2007 T20 CWC in England vs Pakistan ? 2011 CWC in India vs India ? 2012 T20 CWC in SL vs WI ? Niluka’s lost in Bahrain & Olympic This was all the moments we gathered around TV‘s with our friends waiting for ultimate victory but at the end, they lost the cup, we lost confidence, harsh words were voiced, some talking about match fixing, postmortems were done, but after all that we admitted they played well but hard luck & wishing all the best yet again. Is it correct? I don’t think so. If we analyze last 20 years of Sri Lankan sports, these situations are common incidents. What’s the reason? Yes, that is the million dollar question. Is it because our proud President influences the matches? May be he’s the unlucky curse? But in my point of view Sri Lankan sports authority always lack four ingredients, ? Planning ? Organizing ? Believing ? Execution
Planning
That’s the same tragedy that happened to our sports. People who didn’t have knowledge about sports came to administration. As a country, we didn’t have long term plans for sports. Whenever government or minister changes, the whole system changes. We played 30 years of test cricket but still we didn’t have a proper cricket academy with all the facilities. Nearly 50 years competing in Olympics but still we won only two medals. Recently, SLC hired Harun Logared to revamp their management systems. After 03 months time he published the report with all his suggestions. It is same things our journalist have been voicing through years. The cost of that report was Rs 1.8 M. But overall, his report will benefit all the sports, only if the governing body implements it. We want to have long term, midterm & short term plans for all the sports. Plans to be introduced from sports Ministry, where all the governing bodies of sport should fulfill it. Definitely sports law needs to be changed according to the plan.
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