Trainees on the Gurundia hockey stadium put together firewood to make their lunch after their morning coaching session.
| Photo Credit:
Biswaranjan Rout
Inside visuals of the athletics complicated at Bhubaneswar’s Kalinga Stadium.
| Photo Credit:
Biswaranjan Rout
Asian Youth Athletics medallist Sabita Toppo trains on the Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar.
| Photo Credit:
Biswaranjan Rout
Players seen contained in the Sports Science Centre at Kalinga Stadium.
| Photo Credit:
Biswaranjan Rout
An arduous four-km trek and 40-km bus experience later, Binodini Dang and her 12-year-old daughter Rosaline arrive at their vacation spot — a deep-blue artificial hockey turf perched on the sting of a forest. They have come all the way in which from the sleepy village of Asurkhol, tucked away in Odisha’s hills, to a distant city, Gurundia, within the Sundargarh district.
For Binodini, a 40-year-old tribal girl, the sight of the hockey turf is greater than only a reduction; it symbolises hope for her daughter’s future. Sundargarh is thought to supply extra hockey gamers than every other district in India, and Binodini prays that her daughter, too, will signify her nation within the sport sooner or later.
Rosaline has joined a bunch of 110 younger ladies and boys who reside within the rooms adjoining to the turf. In return for their contribution of uncooked rice and ₹300 a month, they are going to get rigorous coaching that can form them into skilled hockey gamers. Although the boarding services are lower than preferrred, the newly laid artificial turf within the distant city of Gurundia stands as a testomony to the State’s formidable foray into the sector of sports activities.
“The struggle [to send her daughter for training] is only temporary. I think it will pay off in the long run,” says Binodini.
Another stadium with artificial hockey turf lies only a block away in Rajgangpur. This stadium, just like the one in Gurundia, provides a major enhance to the residents of the neighbouring village of Kukuda, which has despatched six gamers to the present Indian girls’s hockey crew. Two ladies from close by villages have additionally discovered a spot within the nationwide squad. On any given day, as many as 80 girls and boys may be seen practising on the turf, which lies a kilometre away from Kukuda.
Dilip Tirkey, Hockey India president and former captain of the Indian males’s hockey crew, says the provision of artificial turf is not any small feat. “Finding synthetic turf at one’s doorstep was unthinkable a few years ago. Many senior players played hundreds of games on uneven ground before getting a chance to even step onto synthetic turf,” he says.
In recognition of Sundargarh’s ardour for hockey, the State authorities has made provisions for primary teaching services in all blocks of the district. Sundargarh now has 17 artificial hockey turfs, practically two-thirds of the State’s whole of 25.
Beyond hockey
Track and discipline athletes like Bapi Hansda, Sabita Toppo, and Kishore Jena show that Odisha’s contribution to sports activities isn’t just restricted to hockey.
Hansda, who made historical past by turning into the primary Indian to bag the silver medal within the males’s 400m hurdles class on the Asian Youth Athletics Championships earlier this 12 months, might have had a really completely different life had the State’s sturdy sports activities infrastructure not supported his goals. Hailing from Balasore, Hansda misplaced his father at an early age. and moved in along with his brother, who labored as a sweeper at a railway station in Jajpur district A turning level got here for him when a Physical Education instructor at his faculty recognised his potential and launched him to a coach at a neighborhood stadium. Hansda was subsequently despatched to the Sports Authority of India hostel in Cuttack and later to a high-performance centre (HPC) in Bhubaneswar. The seventeen-year-old has by no means seemed again since.
Similarly, 20-year-old Toppo, daughter of a each day wager from Sundargarh, secured a silver medal within the ladies’ 100m hurdles on the Asian Youth Athletics Championship in Kuwait City final 12 months regardless of the premature lack of her mom. Her humble beginnings could possibly be traced to her admission to a sports activities hostel in her district, after which she secured a spot in an HPC in Bhubaneswar on the again of her expertise.
Of the three athletes, maybe probably the most inspiring story is of 28-year-old Jena, who clinched a silver medal on the Asian Games in October this 12 months with a javelin throw that landed simply wanting the throw by world champion Neeraj Chopra.
Although he was determined to safe a job within the Army to assist assist his farmer mother and father, Jena’s expertise in volleyball and subsequent admission right into a government-run sports activities hostel helped him recognise his aptitude for the javelin. He went on to interrupt the State report for the longest javelin throw in 2017 earlier than bringing India glory on the Asian Games.
Meanwhile, Odisha’s current success in sports activities may be seen most clearly in its efficiency within the 2022 Khelo India Youth Games. The State jumped 17 locations to the ninth spot on the scoreboard, a powerful feat provided that it was ranked twenty sixth, a lot nearer to the underside, within the earlier 12 months’s version of the video games.
The catalyst
One can level to a second, precisely a decade in the past, when sports activities turned a precedence for the State authorities — the launch of ‘Kalinga Lancers’, knowledgeable discipline hockey crew collectively owned by Odisha Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation (IDCO) and Mahanadi Coalfields Limited (MCL), in Bhubaneswar.
The growth created appreciable buzz within the State, and spurred the administration to host a number of hockey tournaments regardless of its restricted expertise in organising main sporting occasions.
From there on, Odisha efficiently hosted the FIH (The Fédération Internationale de Hockey) Hockey Champions Trophy in 2014, the Indo-Japan Hockey Series in 2015, the Hockey World League in 2017, the Hockey Men’s World Cup in 2018, and the FIH Hockey Olympic Qualifiers in 2019. Hockey stadiums within the State witnessed a surge in guests, matching the keenness normally reserved for cricket matches.
Another vital second got here in 2017, when Jharkhand withdrew because the host of the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships on the final second, leaving Bhubaneswar to emerge as the brand new host for the match. Moving with unprecedented pace, the Odisha authorities renovated the capital’s Kalinga Stadium in simply 90 days.
In the next 12 months, Odisha went on to turn into the official sponsor of each the boys’s and girls’s nationwide hockey groups. It will proceed to sponsor them till 2033 — a report for a State. Barring the 2 years of COVID-19, Odisha has hosted 12 main nationwide and worldwide occasions since 2013.
Biggest spender
In its bid to be one of the best within the discipline, Odisha has emerged as the best spender in creating sports activities infrastructure in India.
From a paltry sports activities price range of ₹4.22 crore in 2000-01, the State has allotted a sum of ₹1,223.16 crore to sports activities within the present monetary 12 months, out of a complete price range of ₹2.45 lakh crore. In comparability, a a lot larger State like Uttar Pradesh has allotted solely ₹957 crore this 12 months, adopted by West Bengal at ₹788 crore, Madhya Pradesh at ₹738 crore, and Maharashtra at ₹640 crore.
In its search for expertise exterior hockey, Odisha has knocked on the doorways of akhadas (conventional train centres) close to the Twelfth-century Shree Jagannath Temple upon noticing the shortage of weightlifters within the heavyweight class.
Worth the ‘weight’
Odisha Sports Secretary R. Vineel Krishna explains. “Pandas [priests] are known for their traditional fitness regimen and robust physiques. So, the government allotted ₹50,000 to each akhada last year and incentivised the priests to explore weightlifting,” he says.
The Sports Department is now investing ₹8 crore to coach Puri’s monks in weightlifting, and organises common weightlifting competitions all year long.
Nearly 200 km away, Ganjam district is residence to a 200-seater hostel designed solely for weightlifters — the primary of its form in India. Besides, district-level indoor badminton stadiums additionally embody services for weight coaching, taking the whole rely of such platforms within the State to 150.
Infrastructural assist
Odisha has established quite a lot of HPCs by way of partnerships with multinational firms with enterprise pursuits within the State. Currently, eight sports activities, together with swimming, taking pictures, hockey, soccer, weightlifting, and gymnastics, have devoted HPCs, all of which have reserved 25% seats for the State’s athletes. Notably, all HPCs are manned by a chief coach, junior coaches, trainers, and physiotherapists.
Some of the collaborative HPCs embody the Abhinav Bindra Targeting Performance Centre, the Reliance Foundation Youth Sports for athletics, JSW Sports for swimming, Tata group for hockey, All India Football Federation (AIFF) for soccer growth, and a tie-up between the Aditya Birla Group and the Gagan Narang Sports Promotion Foundation for taking pictures.
International organisations like FIFA (Fédération internationale de soccer affiliation) have additionally displayed curiosity within the State. When FIFA was scouting for appropriate centres to arrange an academy underneath its Talent Development Scheme in India, it selected Bhubaneswar, main the federal government to develop six FIFA-standard fields within the metropolis. Krishna provides that Arsène Wenger, the chief of world soccer growth at FIFA, was “quite impressed” by the sports activities infrastructure in Odisha. “Apart from the football grounds, he [Wenger] visited the sports science centre and equated the facilities with the international standards,” the Sports Secretary provides.
Other noteworthy services embody the state-of-the-art Kalinga Sports Complex in Bhubaneswar, full with a temperature-controlled Olympic-size pool and the capability to seat a thousand individuals; the Birsa Munda Hockey Stadium at Rourkela, which is the most important hockey stadium in India and has a seating capability of over 20,000; and 90 Biju Patnaik multipurpose indoor stadiums, 314 rural mini-stadiums, and 149 city mini-stadiums throughout the State.
“Given the State’s contribution to the field of sports, Odisha’s athletes will outrank their competitors in five or six years,” says Krishna.
Sports science centre
With the institution of the sports activities science centre in Bhubaneswar, gone are the times when prime Indian sportspersons, together with former captain of the Indian hockey crew Prabodh Tirkey and former Olympian Lazarus Barla, needed to rely upon vaidyas [traditional healers] for their accidents.
“I, together with others, relied on the vaidyas‘ unscientific trial-and-error remedies,” says Barla, who, as head coach of Panposh hostel, now oversees the training of 150 budding hockey players.
‘Teach them early’
To instil confidence within the thought of sports activities as a long-term profession, the Odisha authorities has put its religion in a bottom-up method that seeks to teach kids concerning the alternatives within the discipline at an early age.
Teaming up with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the federal government has launched the Olympic Value Education Program (OVEP) in over 350 faculties, reaching out to 2.5 lakh kids. The initiative goals to impart life abilities and values and advocates lifelong sports activities participation for a wholesome way of life.
Moreover, as many as 6,000 athletes bear grassroots coaching and participate in summer season camps throughout the State.
A newly launched scheme, Yuba Odisha Nabin Odisha, rolled out this 12 months, additional goals to attract the youth into sports activities. Under the scheme, the federal government has launched an annual match on the block degree, with over 5 lakh college students having already registered to take part in occasions like cricket, soccer, hockey, and kabaddi competitions. The occasion additionally doubles up as a platform for expertise scouting.
Martin Owen, head coach of HPC Athletics, is worked up concerning the expertise pool in Odisha. “The process to tap talent, provide them a platform for training, and make them eligible to participate in international tournaments is progressing steadily,” he says.
And that’s what retains the hope alive for moms like Binodini, who bids a tearful farewell to her daughter after inserting her within the care of the hockey centre in Gurundia. “My dream of watching Rosaline playing hockey on the big screen will come true,” she says with conviction.
