From: kazi@hercules.cis.udel.edu (Zunaid Kazi)
Subject: Olympics, Sports and Football. Was-> Re: The Joy
Organization: University of Delaware, Newark
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 18:15:40 GMT

In article <l7g9gfINN611@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM> kabir@kabir.Eng.Sun.COM writes:
>
  [ About Dawn, his response, and "news of my demise has been greatly
   exaggerated" have been deleted]

>I'm sure he was proud. And his response was very elegant. It was
>kind of stupid to ask that question, don't you think? It's the same
>media whose cameras dwell on the face of a gymnast who is in tears
>after a fall, or on a star swimmer who lost unexpectedly. In fact, I
>liked the news enough to cut out the clipping and stick it on the
>wall of my apartment. Then I had some visitors from Bangladesh
>who noticed the clipping and commented that this person was not
>the best in Bangladesh. They implied political connections of the
>runner was the reason he got selected. Can anyone verify or deny
>this?

From what I can recall, he was the fastest man in Bangladesh at that time.
He was the only athelete to have bested the qualification time for the
Olympics. I didn't recall any political brouhaha over his selection. 

>Zunaid Kazi wrote:
>>Does anybody know how Shahana fared in her event at the Olympics? From what
>>I know of the schedule, her event is complete.
>
>Sorry, no results, but the Bangladesh shooting team does our country
>proud. It did very well in the last SAF games, including winning
>gold. 

Bangladesh did even better at the '88 Commonwealth Games. [Was that in Melbourne?] 
I would consider the Commonwealth Games to be a more world class sporting
event than the SAF Games. Two Bangladeshi shooters won a gold and a silver.
It was in the pairs air-pistol events. Rapid fire and prone? Pardon the vagueness.

>Its mention caused my mind to wander, so please bear with me:
>I don't know the Bangladesh government's strategy regarding the
>Olympics. Obviously it is very expensive to train athletes to
>come up to an international standard. In light of this expense, a
>"RISC" approach to Olympic training could be pursued, ie, picking
>only one or two sports that the athletes have shown a particular flair
>for, and those that do not cost an arm and a leg to train. Clearly,
>shooting is one such event. It doesn't require lots and lots of
>expensive facilities (like swimming does, for example.) I am not
>advocating that Bangladesh govt abandon all other sports, but that,
>if it is at all interested in winning in the Olympics, it handpick
>a couple of sports and concentrate on them.

I wouldn't have chosen shooting as one of the events that Bangladesh should
shoe. It is still the preserve of the elite. The best shooters from Bangladesh
are predominantly from the Gulshan Rifle Club and the Naraynganj Rifle Club.
[Shahana Lastname?] is from the Narayanganj. Occassionally we do hear of
shooters from the Chittagong Rifles club. This is the kind of event where
the costs are prohibitive enough [Guns and ammunition] to preclude mass
participation. The bigger the pool to choose from, the better the chance
that we might have of developing Olympic class athletes.

Swimming is one such sport. Track and field should be another area where
the government can concentrate on. Just look at the Kenyan long-distance
runners. 

>I strongly believe that any such investment will pay off many times
>its cost in the future as it helps to repair Bangladesh's badly
>damaged international image. (A better image helps get more investment,
>more trade, more employment, better living standards, etc.)

I agree.

>The other problem is discipline. Surely, discipline problems plague
>more or less every sports team in every country. But for Bangladesh they
>hurt more than other countries because we are already trying to painfully
>climb a steep hill. A particularly bad example occured during
>the last SAF games when we lost to Pakistan in soccer. (The Bangladesh
>soccer team is considered better than Pakistan's or India's.) Two versions
>of the reason for the loss I heard was that: 1) the athletes became
>very nervous in the international arena; and 2) the coach apparently
>favored some players who played for the local Dhaka team that he
>was also coach for (Brothers?)

I don't know about reason number one. The Bangladesh team has sufficient 
experience in SAF games, Olympic and World Cup qualifying events, the
President's Cup etc for nervousness to be a reason. I am not qualified
to comment about the second point. I might hazard a guess that it was
overconfidence that did them in.

In all previous SAF games, Bangladesh has always been seeded to win the
Gold, but for some reason or other they failed to do so. Inspite of this
failure the overall record of the Bangladesh football team vis-a-vis the
other subcontinental teams that Bangladesh was always ranked higher than
the other subcontinental teams by FIFA. I vaguely recall the rankings
from 1988. Bangladesh was about 4 or 5 places above either India and
Bangladesh. Ofcourse Bangladesh was pretty low down on the totem-pole,
placed around 16th[?] in Asia. I can hazard a pretty good guess as to
Bangladesh football teams placement with respect to other Asian Nations.

Better than Bangladesh:

Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabai, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan,
Japan, the Koreas, ROC, PROC
[Bangladesh did once defeat N. Korea at Pakistan's Quaid-e-Azam trophy
 in the mid eightees]

Slightly Better or at par:

Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia 
[All three countries used to be definitely better than Bangladesh, but
recently the results have been more even keeled]

Worse:

India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Hong Kong, Yemen,
the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam.

Insufficient information:

Burma [probably better. They were a big force in Asia], all the Indo-Chinese
countries [Vietnam, Laos, Kampuchea], Mongolia.

>I solicit comments and suggestions from netters on these matters 
>(of utmost national urgency, of course :-))

This IS of utmost importance. :)

>- Ihtisham Kabir

- Zunaid Kazi
  kazi@cis.udel.edu

Newsgroups: soc.culture.bangladesh