FOLLOWING DECEMBER’S HOLLOW PROMISES, ANOTHER ROUND OF GRANDIOSE PLANS BY MIN. HARIN

Hard on the heels of his numerous promises last December – as yet to be fulfilled – Sports Minister Harin Fernando delivered another list of sweetened schemes for consumption by the gullible, including fantastic new stadia, state-of-the-art synthetic tracks, a super pools, etc. etc.

Among these pie-in-the-sky plots, plans and proposals was his statement that the Sports Ministry will be handing over management of South Asian Games national teams to the Army. According to the Minister there have been several issues in the maintenance of the national teams at sports hostels and in private facilities, in view of which their absorption by an army camp seems to present a better option.

The minister further promised installation of a new synthetic track at the Bogambara Stadium in Kandy, an assurance that Sports Ministers have been repeating since the mid-2000s. Meanwhile construction of the new synthetic tracks at Diyagama Stadium has been halted due to the company that undertook the project failing to deliver.

That same refrain of failure has been echoed in relation to a legion of other sports facilities in a variety of locations that have yet to materialize: so much so that an entire generation of once aspiring but now despairing athletes has given up all hope that any promises made by a Sports Minister will ever be fulfilled.

However, the Minister insisted that past failures were partly due to the incompetence and shortcoming of the National Sports Associations, which do not have realistic work plans to guide their respective sports forward.

Nuwara Eliya High Performance Center

Even though the Sports Ministry has cut off funding for athletes, including their monthly allowances and funding for regular Open Athletics Championships as well as the Asian Grand Prix, it is forging ahead with the multibillion rupee High Performance Center in Nuwara Eliya. The Minister stated that the project will cost 72 million Euros, to be partly financed locally through a bank loan. Local athletes, however, do not share the Sports Minister’s sanguine confidence in the projected return on investment, complaining that the Sports Ministry had mixed up its priorities.