Road to Victory
Sports have remained as afterthought issue in Nepal because the country seems to give more time and energy for political affairs only. For any Nepali Olympic team, it has always been a matter of participating instead of winning, largely due to the lack of proper resources, training and preparation. Nepal as a country is not able to produce enough quality sport manpower to represent itself in international fronts. The country should understand the real value of sport in broad spectrum, in today’s soft power world; sport is not just playing rather its representing the nation. A nation can display its power either by war in war time or by games in peace time. From its maiden Olympic participation in 1964 to now, how far have we gone in sport representation? The craze to enrol in sport is always there but due to unmanaged system and frustrating facilities, many good players have abandoned their dream to achieve name and fame in sport. Amid such scenario, Nepal should experiment with some innovative possibilities to improve sport sector in long run.
Nepal needs to learn from various sport strategies used by other countries and plans its own accordingly. The idea of “aggregation of marginal gains” has brought unique revolution in some sports. Now the question remains, could strategy be adopted to introduce positive change in Nepali sport sector? The principle of marginal gains is all about minor improvements in any process enhancing major results when all small changes are added together. It can be evidently understood thru an astonishing case of British cycling team. When Sir Dave Brailsford came up as head of British Cycling in 2002, the squad had almost no account of victory: British cycling team had earned not more than single gold in 76 years record. The pendulum of success dramatically swinged to opposite direction under Brailsford’s leadership. British cycling team claimed seven out of ten gold medals available in 2008 Olympics.
Brailsford approach was simple as Synergy effect; he believed that if the riders improved every sphere related to cycling by just 1 %, then those small upgrades would yield cumulative result. They began by making small change in things like: the diet of riders, training schedule, weight of the tires and the micro parts of the bike. They desperately examined minor assets where they could make 1% change and leave no areas in exception. Even they consider the comfortable pillows, massage gel and the best way to wash hands to avoid itching and communicable diseases.
Almost every habit that we acquire throughout life, whether it’s good or bad is actually conditioned by some small choices over time. For example, the first international gold medal winner from Nepal, Jeet Bahadur K.C, who failed to get first position in running because of old feeble shoes. Despite being more than 1km ahead of from other competitor he got third position at last just because of bad shoes. In an interview he said that “If only I had the good shoes, I could have won that game”. In that international platform he was fated to lose because of minor shoes issue. Such was the history of Nepali sport and till now the condition has not changes much, before it was shoes and now it’s good coaching, diets or lack of other basic facilities. However Nepal’s Sport management seems to pay no heed to such prerequisites during training phase of players.
Similarly, people are often cultured to regard any change worthful only if it happens in larger scale or it has some visible outcomes. Whenever there happen any talks regarding development of Nepali sports, we focus on playground and other infrastructural changes but ignore the core of Sport; the players. Even with advance stadium, improvement in not possible unless the emphasis is put on minor faculty of players like water loading, amount of ingredients in diets, mental state of player and other things. We seek for some huge improvements that are almost hard to meet up and miss the minor changes which actually matters.
The concept of improving by one percent may not yield immediate results at times, yet could guarantee sustainable changes with minimum effort. The improving pattern can be built on three basic grounds; firstly, the way of coaching the players (process), secondly the state of performer body or mind and lastly the assets or thing players are working on or with. As failures are resulted by thousands of wrong choices, it can also be altered by similar thousands of right choices.
For this improvement, the sport community need full support from governmental side. The government of Nepal should invest in research and development of new sport strategies as suited for the country. It must also provide proper wearables, quality coaching, and nutrition as per the requirement of the sport and the player. By making 1% improvement in different aspects of sport, Nepal will surely achieve cumulative advantage in upcoming days.
Sites consulted:
Interview With Jeet Bahadur K.C: (9:45–10: 45) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSODSM-tdd0
Theory of Marginal gain:
https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-1-performance-improvements-led-to-olympic-gold
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