KARACHI: Mian Mohammad Rafiq, Director Coordination of the Pakistan Olympic Association (POA) and national course director, has said that capability and quality are the main ingredients that gives edge to an individual for being unique and superior as compared to his group members, team-mates and other contemporaries.

Addressing the participants of the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) Sports Administration course on talent identification and grooming at a local hotel on Wednesday, he said the process envisaged talent identification, selection and confirmation.

He also spelt out special tips, motivational practices, talent pools and some specific principles, sources of potential, ideas to explore talent, initiative measures for talent identification and golden principles.

In the second session, the course director spoke on developing top level athletes.

Another speaker Painda A Malik, enlighten on organising an event and mission and role of NOC’s in two seperate sessions.

Senior sports journalist Anwar Zuberi in his speech dwelt on the role of media in promotion of sports.

He said inventions like computers, sms and mobile phones though opened new avenues but at the same time they have lessened the leg-work of journalists who, in most of the cases, have become dependent on them. “All this has also unfortunately led to the copy-paste culture which has deprived the readers of a genuine newspaper story which could give them a balanced and factually correct view rather than just one angle.

Media has become very progressive today, for computers have replaced typewriters while email has succeeded in replacing telex messages and fax machines and the usage of sms and mobile phones is on the rise because it is very convenient. “Contrary to the past, the organisers of an event have many options now to send their news across to the journalists,” he maintained.

Continuing, he said, that the print and electronic media plays a vital role in the promotion of sports. Media is also considered as one of the four pillars of state. He added that colourful sports pages of a newspaper depicting big action photographs and stories are widely read by all segments of the society so do sports programmes and critical panel discussions on television channels.

It’s the media that highlights the heroics of a player or team and criticises the bad performances in order to create awareness among the masses, he added.

He added that heavy responsibility lies on the shoulders of working sports journalists to double check their facts before getting the stories into print or airing them on channels. For instance, the presence of a journalist at a match for an eye-witness account authenticates his story.Citing the example of snooker, Zuberi said: “It has scaled new heights due to the consistent media coverage. Today the youth can easily recognise Asif, Sajjad or Hamza much in the same way that the fans used to know familiar faces of Samiullah, Kaleemullah or Hasan Sardar (hockey), legendary Hanif Mohammad, Imran Khan or Javed Miandad (cricket) and Jahangir Khan or Jansher Khan (squash) in the past.”

Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2015

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