PAKISTAN’S third assault on the Asian Games titles will begin today in Jakarta when the fourth competition of the series will be declared open by President Soekarno of Indonesia. The first of these Games were staged in Delhi in 1951 in which Pakistan did not take part. Pakistan appeared [for the] first time in the second competition of the series in 1954 in Manila where our athletes won four gold and four silver medals, while another gold medal was earned by one of our wrestlers.

The tally of medals by our athletes increased in the third Asian Games in Japan where they won 13 — five gold, four silver and four bronze. This was in addition to the gold medal won by our hockey team, two silver and two bronze by our boxers and three silver and two bronze by our wrestlers. In all, we had earned 23 medals in the Tokyo Games.

The achievements of our athletes, in these crisis-haunted Games in Jakarta, whose participants are threatened with possibly disqualification by I.A.A.F., are going to be far below expectations and their tally of medals wouldn’t be even as high as they had recorded in the last Games in Tokyo.

Although their coach has announced that the boys will put up their best-ever performance in Jakarta … all our well-known stars have gone down and some of them considerably…. While there has been an overall rise in the athletic standards of other Asian countries during the past two years, there has been a sudden drop in the same in our country. — Sports Correspondent