National wrestlers are undergoing training at the PSB Coaching Centre, Lahore, for the last two weeks to prepare for the Olympic Qualifiers, both continental and world qualification tournaments.

The Asian Qualification tournament will be held from April 19-21 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and the World Qualification tournament will be conducted in Istanbul from May 9-12.

Before these events, national grapplers will feature in the Asian Championship which will also be held in Bishkek from April 11-16.

As many as seven wrestlers, Mohammad Bilal (57 kg), Abdullah (65kg), Asadullah (74kg), Sharif Tahir (79 kg), Haider Ali (86 kg), Mohammad Inam Butt (97 kg) and Zaman Anwar (125 kg), will be featuring in the Asian Championship.

As far as the Asian Qualifiers are concerned, Mohammad Bilal, Abdullah and Mohammad Inam Butt are confirmed and the authorities will see if any other wrestler in the Asian Championship-bound squad clicks in the continental event. Then he may also get a chance to flex his muscles in the Asian Qualifiers.

The PWF also plans to send the three Olympic Qualifiers-bound grapplers to Bishkek ten days before the Asian Championship and according to sources they will proceed on April 3.

After the Asian Qualifying round the wrestlers will come back and will go straight to the camp to prepare for the World Qualifying round to be held in Istanbul.

The Asian Qualifiers will be the second opportunity for the wrestlers to press for the Olympics seats. Last year in September the World Championship in Serbia was the qualifying round but there our three top wrestlers failed to click.

As many as thirty wrestlers are undergoing training at the Punjab capital at night time due to Ramadan.

I have learnt that the grapplers undergo around four to five hours of workout until sehri.

The big issue is that we are not ready for the Qualifiers in the actual sense.

Having covered the discipline for the last two decades I understand that it will be extremely difficult for our less-prepared wrestlers to click in the Qualifiers.

The camp started too late and in fact no strategy was seen right from the start. The wrestlers should have been sent abroad for training for a few months. Unless they undergo extensive training abroad nothing can happen.

I always say that we don’t take sports seriously. We deal it with just a casual approach. The federations’ top officials enjoy foreign tours and are happy with the way things are going. No serious thinking is there. The big issue is that generally there is no will. And if there is no will then there is no way.

Although our three leading wrestlers recently went to the US for an event, two of them underwent hardly a month of training which was also marred by Christmas holidays. Had that tour been extended until April then it could have benefitted those two top wrestlers. One had returned after featuring in an event there.

I got an opportunity to see the trials held at Lahore’s Punjab College multipurpose gymnasium a few days ago which were arranged for picking wrestlers for the Asian Championship and the Olympics Qualifiers. A huge gap was seen between the top seeds and the rest of the lot in the respective weight categories. Yes, in a couple of weights some tough contests were seen. The big issue is how you can train top wrestlers for an international event at home. During training top seeds don’t get sparring partners good enough to help them improve. They will always need tough wrestlers to train with. And if we don’t give long training tours to our athletes how they will improve and fight for the Olympics spots.

It’s a big question mark on the overall sports culture of Pakistan which lacks so many things.

If we cannot hire foreign coaches and send our wrestlers abroad for training for a sufficient time frame then there is no hope.

The country’s premier wrestler Mohammad Inam this time will play in the 97kg and increasing his weight from 86kg definitely will also slow down his agility further. Bilal is a gutsy wrestler. In his weight too there are not so many tough fighters who could help him improve in training. Let’s see how they fight in the coming challenging events.

At the hostel food is given to the wrestlers but I have learnt that its quality is not that good. And it’s a fact that the state always fails to provide good food to national athletes who prepare for major international events.

I have seen the diet which was given to the last year’s Hangzhou Asian Games-bound squads in Islamabad. It was pathetic.

The state always gives too slow a response as far as the Olympics Qualifiers are concerned.

Our government and other institutions are backing the country’s leading javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem generously for claiming a few international medals but they don’t bother to correct the sports system so that more Arshad Nadeems could be produced.

Unless we take sports seriously nothing big can be achieved barring some rare exploits from the athletes with individual brilliance here and there.

We featured in boxing qualifiers and taekwondo qualifiers but it was just a formality as we did not do anything in those sports disciplines.

Yes, in shooting we have done well as three of our shooters, Ghulam Mustafa Bashir, Joseph Gulfam and Kishmala Talat, have qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics. Arshad Nadeem and France-based eventer Usman Khan are the others. Usman will need to maintain his status until the end of the timeline and only then will he be part of Pakistan’s contingent for the Paris Olympics.

Besides those who have directly qualified Pakistan also is waiting for surprise universality places although our country is not in the list of those NOCs which will be awarded universality places.

In swimming, Pakistan will get two wild card entries and in athletics there is a chance that a female athlete may get a wild card entry as happened last time.

The Athletics Federation of Pakistan (AFP) will need to provide a few chances to the country’s No2 javelin thrower Mohammad Yasir Sultan who can manage an Olympics seat if he features in a few international events by the June 30 timeline set by the World Athletics.

73.alam@gmail.com