India has realised that something is seriously wrong within our system that is preventing our players to win medals in the Olympics. Our Prime Minister showed his keen interest in rectification of this problem and has created "Olympic Task Force". This force comprise of eight prominent people from India; Abhinav Bindra, Pullela Gopichand, Viren Rasquinha, Om Pathak, S Baldev Singh, G L Khanna, Rajesh Kalra and Sandeep Pradhan.
The first brain storming session of the ‘Olympic Task Force’ was conducted in Ahmedabad. Around 60 prominent people from Gujarat, who has keen interest in Sports, were invited to share their thoughts. Each invitee was entrusted to discuss the best idea based on his expertise that can help our sportsmen to perform their best in the Olympics. Dr Goyal, who has a keen interest in injury prevention in the sportsmen, shared his thoughts on the subject. Major ideas that he gave were...
1. Individualize the diet plan. A goal keeper has to have a sharp mind and quick reflexes while a forward player runs typically 10 km in 90 minutes and needs more stamina. Both has a different food and energy requirements and hence a central system cannot decide the food plan for the whole team.
2. We need to work on over 1,00,000 player to shortlist one potential Olympic medal winner. Loss of this potential Olympic player due to an injury is not the loss of one player but a loss of 100000 players preparation. Hence, we cannot afford to loose a single player due to injury.
3. A pre-rehabilitation and post-rehabilitation is most important after any injury. This is very much neglected as our teams don't have dedicated sports physicians.
4. There are no "injury Prevention Programs' in our system. India must have those programs on regular basis.
5. There is huge talent in India when we talk about different expertise related to sports. But there are no opportunities to bring all these different talents on one platform and discuss. A meeting of different disciplines must be organised frequently.
6. He also raised an important point like lack of awareness amongst sportsmen and his teammates about the most common injuries that can occur in their respective sports. He also stressed that team management is ill-equipped to give primary treatment on the field and most of the time, they are unaware and unprepared about the next step, if a major injury occurs. Dr Deepak Goyal, who conducted a seminar on "Injury Free Sportsmen" in 2014 at Ahmedabad; also shared his experience of talking with various sportsperson. Most of the sportsmen he talked had expressed the loss of career due to improper post-injury care given to them. The main reason for improper post-injury care was improper coordination between sports managers and sports physicians.
His opinion was widely covered by local media as well. Mr Om Pathak from Olympic Task Force accepted these suggestion as important and valid. We hope that these sugestions will be implemented and will help India.
SO team