Half - time: The hope for things different
By
Inas Mazhar
This time it's going to be different. It's the new year and no one is ready to listen to any more excuses.
What we want in this new year is for the country's sports to embrace a new philosophy, a new concept accompanied by a new mentality. There must be new and fresh ideas to push our sports programmes forward. And there must be new policies to be executed by the Youth Ministry. There has been enough disappointment this year and other years past.
We want to see an improvement in sports which did not do well this year. We want to see that some sports regained lost ground.
We want to make sure that all our athletes have gotten what they deserve in terms of monetary bonuses. It is a fact that some athletes have yet to receive the money due them years ago. In many cases, they are still being paid amateur money, ie, they barely get by, but even that is not coming in.
Athletes, like most other humans, cannot produce if they are neglected and especially if their financial rights are not met. An early retirement is the usual result, in which case the sport in question is the biggest loser.
In 2003 we hope that the Ministry of Youth will come to the rescue of a few federations whose future is threatened by a cash deficit. The squash federation, for one, has been complaining for months about the lack of financial resources and how, in the absence of meaningful financial backing, it will not be able to continue at the top flight level of the game its players reached in the 1990s.
The squash crisis is real enough. Last year, the players failed to notch up anything of worth in the men's and women's world championships and while the federation does not work on a shoe-string budget, the double disappointments could in no small measure be put down to not enough cash reaching a sport whose upkeep is generally expensive.
The first major world championship in this new year, and the first test for us, will be in handball; the men's championship will take place this month in Portugal. We hope that the second most popular game in Egypt continues to remain just that after a less than average 2002.
As we start the new year, we wish all the country's sportsmen and sportswomen, officials, trainers, administrators and athletes the best of luck and a productive year, free of finger-pointing and passing the buck. We want results and one of the best ways to achieve this is to look back on past mistakes, make the necessary corrections, then look straight ahead. This time we want things to be different.
