University should be our oasis of Olympians, says Sports Minister Anurag Thakur

By Team ISN August 17, 2021

Sports minister Anurag Thakur has said that Indian universities should give us Olympians if the nation needs to develop its Tokyo Games execution in future Olympic Games.

“We need to involve the universities. University should be our oasis of Olympians. If you look globally, look at Stanford, they won 26 medals this time. In the last Olympics in Rio, they won about 27 medals. So we need to learn from them. And that is why Prime Minister Modi started university sports games that are under the Khelo India programme,” Anurag Thakur told Times Now.

“One state-one sport, one corporate-one sport. Why not one district-one sport also? We really need to work in that fashion. You look at the small countries and even universities. They’re working on specific sports and they put their energies, money and infrastructure to win medals in those respective areas. So India also needs to understand which the games they can do well in are,” he added.

“We need to involve more corporates into this. We need to hold sports federations more accountable and make sport federations more professional in their working and in their approach as well. So the moment we ask the corporate sector to get involved, each corporation should adopt one Olympic discipline and support it with the best of their capabilities at district, state, whatever level they can. We need corporations and business leaders to think about sport, if we want our nation to take sports and sportspersons a lot more seriously.”

The sports minister gave the example of BCCI Thakur: “We created a lot of infrastructure in cricket, where we now have a lot of academies, stadiums. Not a single rupee has been spent by any government; it has been created by the BCCI,” he said.

“We can do the same by involving more corporations into this; they can create infrastructure. Globally, you have seen that stadiums are built by many corporations. They build them, they own them and give it to the various federations to run them. That can be done here. City corporations can also do it, like the BMC can step forward for instance.”

Anurag Thakur said India should look to be among the top 25 countries in the 2028 Olympics.

“When we are celebrating the 75th year of Independence, let us also target for the next 25 years where we want to reach. We should have short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. As far as the 2028 Olympics is concerned, India should look to be among the top 25 countries and for the next few years, we should aim to be among the top 10 countries in the world.”