A chance to end our Olympic medal drought 

by Rex Clementine 

Population of a nation is no indication of their sporting talents or achievements. Look at Barbados. Their population is less than 300,000 but look at the cricketers they have produced. Desmond Haynes, Gordon Greenidge, Three Ws, Sir Garry Sobers, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner, and the list goes on. Similarly, Fiji with a population of less than 900,000 are sure of a medal at Olympics. Their rugby has not let them down.

Sri Lanka won their first Olympic medal in 1948 in London and had to wait for more than half a century to win their second in Sydney.

At present our athletes qualifying for the Olympics itself is considered a noteworthy achievement by many. Fans don’t expect our stars to go beyond the first round at the games. But there was excitement among local fans this week following the announcement that cricket could feature in the games as early as Los Angeles in 2028, followed by Brisbane 2032 and thereon.

So, countries like Sri Lanka where the main sport is cricket, have got a good chance to have a crack at the Olympics and finish with a medal.

All these years, unless you have a champion like Susanthika Jayasinghe or Duncan White, you had little chance of a medal. You just live in hope that we are able to produce a champion athlete somewhere down the line as we do not reach the required standards to field a side in team sports. But now all that is set to change and we can look forward to the performances of our team when Olympics is around. They could well go on to end the medal drought.

Not just Sri Lanka, but for other Asian nations like Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the introduction of cricket is a good opportunity for them to end the medal drought.

Cricket should have featured in the Olympics a long time ago. There was a push to bring the sport into Olympics sometime back. But for a variety of reasons, India blocked the move.

There was a lot of hope that cricket will feature in the 2012 games when London hosted the Olympics with cricket being the national sport of Great Britain. But it was not to be.

However with Jay Shah, Indian cricket’s most powerful man giving the nod for cricket to be included at Olympics, there is a lot of excitement.

There was a time between 2007 to 2014 that Sri Lanka had an excellent run in ICC events. They reached five World Cup finals and won one. Don’t you get the feeling that had cricket been there at Olympics in that period the nation could have won a few medals? Surely, we missed gold.