For the very first time, the Bangladesh Olympic Association is planning to bring the athletes under a long-term preparation programme in order to perform well in international meets like the Commonwealth Games and Asian Games next year.
The BOA will start a 10-month long residential training programme later this month for the promising athletes to be held in the Bangladesh Army Cantonment and some other venues.
The governing body finalised five disciplines – shooting, swimming, archery, boxing and taekwondo — for the first phase of the training programme.
Initially the BOA sorted out a list of 62 talented athletes from 13 different disciplines but General Iqbal Karim Bhuiyan, Chief of Army Staff and also the president of BOA, later expressed his wish about seeing the number of athletes and disciplines reduced in order to put more emphasis on quality.
Due to the president’s desire, the BOA on Sunday formed a five-member committee and shortened the list from 62 athletes to 30.
‘The Army Chief of Staff wants to proceed with a vision. He asked many things after seeing the primary list of 62 athletes. He also follows sports keenly and has his own thoughts,’ said Badal Roy, deputy secretary general of the BOA on Wednesday.
‘He [Iqbal] commanded us to reduce the list,’ he added.
The BOA will bring in coaches from abroad to train the athletes but a final decision on whether the foreign coaches will be recruited permanently shall have to wait.
‘Everyone may want to coach but the BOA will select the coaches according to their past records with the permission of the respective federations,’ said Badal adding that the estimated budget for the training program will be Tk two crore including the salary of the foreign coaches.
‘Initially we fixed an estimated budget of Tk two crore but it might increase in the future when we will start
the second phase training programme,’ Badal added.
Meanwhile, the five-member committee visited the National Shooting Complex on Wednesday to find out the actual reason why the National Shooting Federation of Bangladesh snubbed Sharmin Akter Ratna from the list.
‘We saw some reports in the media that the NSFB excluded Sharmin Akter Ratna from the list despite her several successes in international tournaments in the near past. Now we are positively thinking about including her name in the list,’ he added.
-With New Age input
