Low investment, fruitful results in beach games

KATHMANDU, Oct 15: Nepal participated in the First South Asian Beach Games without much preparation but surprisingly won eight medals and achieved fourth position in the event contested by eight countries.



Nepal is a landlocked country where beach games are hardly played. Most often the games are played on artificial beach and sometimes on river beach. [break]



Quite unexpectedly, equestrian fetched the only gold medal and two silver and bronze medals each for Nepal while popular events like basketball, volleyball, handball and others failed to win any.



Nepal bagged gold in the individual event of rings and peg of equestrian. In Team Lance and Team Sword, Nepal had to satisfy with silver and with bronze in Individual Lance and Team Ring and Peg. Dhurba Prasad Aryal was the most successful player for Nepal as he won a gold medal and a silver and bronze each in team events.



After winning the medals in the equestrian event, Nepali Captain Khad Bahadur Karki said that Nepal would have won more medals if they were well aware about the rules and regulation of the game.



Football also won a bronze in the beach games. Nepali footballers were playing on beach for the first time and without preparation. The medal fuelled hope that with proper training on beach Nepal could have won a high profile medal.



Both men´s and women´s Kabaddi teams received bronze medals after Afghanistan pulled out from the event. Nepal got bronze despite loosing all matches.



The bronze medalist of South Asian Beach Volleyball 2006, Nita Shah and Chuda Khadka, had performed well in the games. The duos said that the sand on which they had played earlier was different than the sand of Sri Lanka. The pair had defeated India in the league round but lost the third place playoff with India as Shah was suffering from fever.







Handball was a different story as president of the association, Tej Gurung, had to join the team due to lack of player which gave enough evidence of poor management of Nepali squad. Secretary of the handball association, Sandesh Kumar Regmi had taken the charge of post in the court. Nepal lost all handball matches.



The women´s basketball team also faced similar fate losing all of its matches by huge margins. Nepal lost all the league matches and also squandered the chance to winning bronze following a defeat in the third place playoff.



Despite controversies, Nepal´s first participation in the First South Asian Beach Games proved to be worthy. National Sports Council (NSC), the apex sport body of the nation, did not support the players and associations participating in the games.



The conflict between NSC and Nepal Olympic Committee (NOC) hightened after NOC decided to participate in the beach games at their own cost. The ongoing rivalry with NOC notwithstanding, NSC has announced to award the medal winners of the games which is sure to encourage players and the associations.

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