Universities should be our oasis in producing Olympians: Thakur

Universities should be our oasis in producing Olympians: Thakur

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

16.08.2021

Sports minister Anurag Thakur has said that Indian universities should give us Olympians if the country has to improve upon its Tokyo Games performance in future Olympic Games. “We need to involve the varsities.

“University should be our oasis of Olympians. If you look globally, look at Stanford, they won 26 medals this time… In the last Olympics in Rio, they won about 27 medals. So we need to learn from them. And that is why Prime Minister Modi started university sports games that are under the Khelo India programme,” Thakur told Times Now’s Rahul Shivshankar.

“One state-one sport, one corporate-one sport. Why not one district-one sport also? We really need to work in that fashion. You look at the small countries and even universities.

They’re working on specific sports and they put their energies, money and infrastructure to win medals in those respective areas. So India also needs to understand which are the games they can do well in,” Thakur added.

Thakur said corporate houses should come forward and adopt Olympic sports. “We need to involve more corporates into this. We need to hold sports federations more accountable and make sport federations more professional in their working and in their approach as well.

“So, the moment we ask the corporate sector to get involved, each corporation should adopt one Olympic discipline and support it with the best of their capabilities at district, state, whatever level they can… We need corporations and business leaders to think sport, if we want our nation to take sports and sportspersons a lot more seriously."

Giving the example of the cricket board (BCCI) Thakur said: “We created a lot of infrastructure in cricket, where we now have a lot of academies, stadiums. Not a single rupee has been spent by any government, it has been created by the BCCI. We can do the same by involving more corporates into this, they can create infrastructure. Globally, you have seen that stadiums are built by many corporations.

“They build them, they own them and give it to the various federations to run them. That can be done here. City corporations can also do it, like the BMC can step forward for instance.”

Thakur said India should look to be among the top 25 countries in the 2028 Olympics.

“When we are celebrating the 75th year of Independence, let us also target for the next 25 years where we want to reach.

“We should have shortterm, mid-term, and longterm goals. As far as the 2028 Olympics is concerned, India should look to be among the top 25 countries and for the next few years we should target being among the top 10 countries in the world.”