Sri Lanka pin hopes on their athletes

THE fate of Sri Lanka's record 280-member contingent at the 15th Asian Games would mainly depend on their athletes as the track & field competition gets underway today.

Despite many pre Game predictions, our swimmers, shooters, lifters, rowers, sailors, cyclists, shuttlers, tennis and chess players, to name a few, failed to make any impact. Not only they failed to make their presence felt in Doha, but also painted a poor picture.

Many of them cut a sorry figure in even failing to reach their personal best - forget about winning medals or entering a final.

Adding to Sri Lanka's misery was that punishment meted out to cyclist Sriyalatha Wickremasinghe and Sri Lanka team manager Nilantha Fernando. They were fined Swiss Francs 30 and 100 respectively.

The organisers found Wickremasinghe being guilty of gaining an undue advantage by sheltering behind a car during Monday's women's 113km road race at which the Lankan lass finished 21st clocking three hours, 11 minutes and 39 seconds.

It is pity that our Colombo South Asian Games double gold medalist had to go from grace to disgrace.

We do know exactly her side of the story, but the fact is that the Asian Games organisers have found her guilty.

Course marshals manning the two-lap route spotted the Lankan lass riding close to a motorcar, thereby gaining an advantage to reduce the wind resistance and breaching UCI regulations paragraph 19:2.1.

In the absence of our golden boy Andrew Abeysinghe, who was forced to pull out of the Games on the eleventh hour, our swimmers 'drowned' at the Doha Games pool. They not only made poor exits from first round heats itself, but even failed come close to their Sri Lanka records.

Our shooters were completely off target and were far behind the rest. In early 90s, Sri Lanka shooting even hard some Olympic prospects in Pushpamali Ramanayake.

But there was no proper mechanism to groom them for future, as we did with athletes in the mid 90s.

Sri Lanka shooting reached its peak when Ramanayake and Mali Wickremasinghe bagged Commonwealth Games women's shooting gold medal in Canada in 1994. But sadly, our shooting standards have gone done over the past few years.

The NRA now has a capable set of officials. With the new Sri Lanka Navy International Range in Welisara, they should make every endeavour to plan our future with a next generation set of shooters.

The Lanka Olympic officials decided to send a huge contingent, their biggest ever in the Asian Games history, after the local organisers here assured free accommodation to all participants.

That was a sensible move as the experience our sportsmen and women gain at Asian level would be a distinct advantage. It is an investment for the future.

But the big question is whether our National Sports Associations (NSA) made adequate preparations for the Asian Games. Most NSAs are only interested two know how many of their officials would get a break to tour, not the well being of their competitors.

Most NSAs did not make any preparations, except for naming a makeshift team at the last moment.

Some offered a crash course. Our sports officials and NSAs are famous for instant stuff. But what we should remember is there are no short cuts to success at Olympic or Asian Games level.

It's purely the hard work and dedication over a period of time that would make a true champion.

Medals at Olympic and Asian Games levels are hard to come. They could only be achieved with proper planning and application to work. We have failed to understand this biter truth.

Take China as an example. The revolution in Chinese sports began even before they put forward their bid for the 2008 Games. Once they won the bid to host the 2008 summer Games, they intensified their campaign.

Their target is to break the American dominance at Olympics.

In order to achieve that goal, China has been targeting various sporting events prior to the Olympics> This is in order to test their emerging athletes. Doha Asian Games provides the biggest platform for China, or for any Asian country for that matter, to make their experiments and try out their next generation sportsmen and women.

The lads and lasses from Beijing have already proved it here and are bound to end up with a rich gold harvest by the time the 44-nation Games ends in Doha later next week.

Going back to Sri Lanka's chances in Doha, our athletes remain the only gold medal prospect at the moment as the track and field competition is due to get underway today. The good news is that star woman sprinter Susanthika Jayasinghe has fully recovered and is roaring to have a go.

She not only has recovered and fit, but also maintains a high morale.

In the absence of Damayanthi Darsha and Sugath Tillakaratne, two of our most successful athletes at the last two Asian Games, Jayasinghe is determined to give Sri Lanka that elusive sprint double.

Good luck for the Sri Lanka athletic team in their search for gold in the Middle East desert.