Pistorius, who was born with congenital absence of the fibula in both legs, has a personal best timing of 45.07 seconds in 400m. [break]
He was part of South Africa´s silver medal winning relay team in the World Championship, where he became the first amputee to win an able-bodied world track medal although he was not selected for the final.
On the other hand, best national record from a Nepali athlete in 400m sprint dates back to 1990 Asian Games, Beijing, where Asha Ram Chaudhary had clocked 48.32 seconds. The current lot of Nepali athletes are nowhere near the national record set by Chaudhary 21 years ago. The current 400m champion Tilak Ram Tharu had clocked 49.32 seconds during the selection tournament held before the recently concluded World Championship.
Oscar Pistorius´ story is only an anecdote to illustrate the sorry state of Nepali Athletics.
Sushil Narsingh Rana, newly-appointed chief coach for athletics, blames the traditional method of training, poor sporting environment and players´ attitude for this embarrassing state of Nepali athletics.
“We are forcing traditional training methodology and ignoring the mechanism of an athlete´s body. The good results that we have achieved so far were all due to individual athlete´s guts,” said Rana. “South Asian athletes are physically similar to us but we lag behind because we lack scientific training,” he added.
According to Rana, Nepali athletes are ignoring factors of heredity and environment while training. There are two types of muscle fiber namely, slow twitch and fast twitch. “Athletes genetically having slow twitch fiber can´t run sprint and athletes with fast twitch fiber can´t run marathon or long distance races,” said Rana.
“However, we are ignoring these facts since our sports authorities do not provide facilities for such medical check-ups,” he added.
Sprints are also called anaerobic races since anaerobic metabolism is used by body to create fuel. “The power is reciprocal to volume of muscle in sprint races but we are ignoring this fact too,” said Rana. “The practice of conducting weight training is slowly growing these days. Earlier, such trainings were provided only to throwers,” he added.
Coaches sometimes blame the attitude of athletes for the poor results but Rana says the attitude problem is a byproduct of a wrong environment. “Players sometimes remain reluctant to learn and train hard but I blame the environment for it,” said Rana.
According to Rana, the athletics authority in the country do not give a clear picture of its plans and programs to the athletes and the coaches.
“If you don´t give a clear target to athletes, they get irritated during training. Training is a complex process since mental and physical factors are the key issues here. In this context, if you don´t give them proper targets and incentives on achieving them, they slowly become reluctant to learn and train,” explained Rana.
After taking the charge of his office as the chief coach, Rana set his priorities.
“As NSC has started training for the national team targeting the upcoming South Asian Games, I´ll focus myself to bring a system in the training camp,” said Rana. “I´ll give targets to my fellow coaches within NSC for the Sixth National Games and organize a workshop for them to adopt scientifice approach of training,” he added.
Around 20 Nepali athletes used to secure positions on the Asian chart of top 100 athletes published by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) until 1995 but there is no Nepali athlete on the list at present.
Meanwhile, Nepal Amateur Athletics Association (NAAA), the governing body of Nepali athletics, has always been mired in controversy through out the last decade.
NAAA is still in a raging controversy. National Sports Council appointed Nilendra Shrestha as NAAA President on July 29 dissolving the committee led by General Secretary Rabiraj Rajkarnikar. Shrestha committee conducted a general assembly last week but the election has raised doubts over Nepali athletes´ participation in international events.
IAAF, the supreme athletics body of the world, has not given its recognition to the Shrestha committee.
“It´s high time we spared some thought for Nepali athletics,” said Rana.
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