CHENNAI: Finally, the Mission Olympic Cell (MOC) had a more intense meeting on Tuesday. The newly-constituted MOC had its first meeting that was seen more as an orientation in early January but on Tuesday seemed to be intense where important decisions had been taken. The focus was LA 2028 and as pointed out by this newspaper, they are already six months late. The Paris Olympics got over in August.
Some of the agendas of the MOC meeting were to “finalise TOPS Core and Development groups; performance review timeline; processes of hiring coaches and support staff and emphasis on hiring of Olympic world level athletes as coaches; payment of OPA to TOPS athletes, etc”.
Since the end of the Olympics and modest performance of India, eyes were on the weeding out process of the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS) athletes in both Core and Development group. At the time of Paris, the list included a total of 179 athletes including 59 para-athletes. Among the 120 Core Olympic athletes, 32 track and field and 26 shooters top the chart. The Development group has 130 players with shooting and boxing heading the numbers. The MOC and the TOPS had been considering athletes’ request on a case-to-case basis. TOPS is sports ministry's flagship programme to help and assist country's top athletes.
The TOPS list is expected to be trimmed and if sources are to be believed it could be around 50 athletes in Olympic sports. As pointed out by this newspaper, TOPS needs to take a hard decision on non-performers. The Development group too might see new names though the numbers will remain more than Core group this time. Creating a healthy bench strength is what the officials are looking at. In all likelihood there could be at least two or three top squash players’ names in Core group as the sport is considered as medal hopes in the LA 2028.
This list was being re-assessed and redrawn after the new TOPS Chief Executive Officer (CEO) NS Johal assumed office in December, close to five months after the Olympics. The TOPS had been working on evaluation mechanism as well. According to some MOC members, who attended the meeting, one of the primary topics of discussion as expected was TOPS athletes’ assessment. It is understood that there was a proposal to evaluate athletes on a six monthly basis. However, the members felt this would be a very short period for some sport. Though most agreed that some kind of mechanism should be in place to assess them constantly but for weeding out or promotion a year would be more appropriate. As of now that period was two years. What should be the criteria too need to be seen.
Like pointed out in this column, TOPS needs to take a fresh look into its systems and processes. In the last Olympic cycle, this programme seemed to have gone into overdrive to fund athletes. There were occasions when it looked like players controlling TOPS rather than TOPS monitoring their performances.
The MOC meeting also discussed various ways of promoting Indian coaches, especially the top ones. There have been proposal to incentivize coaching and also some kind of criteria to grade them. The present payment structure too needs to be looked at. According an MOC member who attended the meeting, Indian coaches with more experience and producing results could be given higher remunerations in the future.
The meeting was chaired by sports secretary Sujata Chaturvedi and was attended by joint secretary (sports), TOPS CEO and other MOC members like London bronze medallist Gagan Narang, badminton chief national coach P Gopichand, Cyrus Poncha (Squash Rackets Federation of India), Adille Sumariwalla (athletics) and representatives of select sports foundations.