Kathmandu (AsiaNews) - They may not win any medals, and it is very likely that they will not achieve stellar results. The Nepalese athletes who will participate in the Beijing games hope, however, to "break the national records", and, above all, they feel honored to "represent their country": in the Olympic spirit, they emphasize that participating is itself already a victory.
To win a spot in the Olympics, in fact, the athletes not only had to place first in their respective competitions, but they also contended with - or enjoyed - "political favoritism and nepotism", which in some cases proved to be fundamental in choosing the participants. On Monday, August 4, the Nepalese delegation will leave for the Chinese capital, and will be composed of about 30 people, eight of whom are athletes - competing in six different events - together with their trainers.
"Political inference has ruined Nepalese sports", Rukma Shamsher Rana,a member of the Asian Olympic council and president of the Nepalese Olympic committee, tells AsiaNews. "The participants are selected not on the basis of entire quality rather on the basis of favoritism and nepotism." He says he is not expecting "any good results", and stresses that "participants should have been selected on the basis of performance and qualifications, jointly by the ministry of sports, the Nepal Olympic committee and the Nepal sports council, through dialogue".
For their part, the athletes are thinking only of doing well in the competitions in which they will participate, with the primary objective being that of beating the national records: "I can't say whether I will win any medals", says Deepak Bista, 32 years old and the nation's Taekwondo champion, "but I am confident that I can break national records. I will try my best for the name of my motherland and her international reputation. I will never hesitate even to pay my life in competition". Marathon runner Arjun Basnet says he has no ambition of mounting the Olympic stand, but hopes to place well. The swimmer Prasiddha Jung Thapa denounces, instead, "the difficulty of preparing for the games" because of "scarce economic resources and the lack of technology" available (editor's note: in swimming alone, one must consider the importance of the material used to create the swimsuit, fundamental for "stealing" a few tenths of a second). As if this were not enough, he also speaks of "various forms of interference" that do not help the athletes to excel in their competitions, with a tacit reference to the political maneuvers that extend to sports as well.
With the growing Maoist influence in the country, a profound division has been created among the various sporting organizations. Political and ideological differences have led to the creation of two different Olympic committees, each of which has brought pressure to have its own representatives chosen. Only in recent days has the government affirmed the existence of a single organization, the Olympic committee of Nepal, headed by Shamsher Rana.
