World Cup adds to Bhubaneswar’s legacy
BHUBANESWAR: Exit the Biju Patnaik International Airport and you’ll know the Odisha capital is prepping to host the hockey World Cup. Billboards, posters and creative installations across streets are adding to the build-up of the November 28-December 16 event.
Having already hosted the 2014 Champions Trophy and the 2017 World League Final, the city will host its third major hockey international event in four years.
“Approximately ~82 crore is the World Cup budget. We are getting ready to give everyone a brilliant experience,” Odisha government’s sports secretary Vishal Dev said.
Apart from refurbishing the Kalinga Stadium, large-scale landscaping has also helped deck up the surroundings of the
World Cup venue.
CENTRE FOR ATHLETICS
That apart, heavy investment has also gone into developing others sports such as athletics and badminton.
“The idea is to move towards strengthening the grassroots. Our high performance centre for athletics should be launched in another two months. We are also looking at a high performance centre for hockey and to host two more major hockey events next year for which discussions are on,” said Dev, who is also the commissioner of Department of Sports and Youth Services.
The Odisha government is one of the three signatories to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the athletics centre along with International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and Athletics Federation of India (AFI).
Bhubaneswar also played host to the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships.
“We have now become the base for the U-15 national football team and also the base for Indian Arrows in I-league. Last year, we hosted the first edition of the Super Cup where all I-league and Indian Super League (ISL) teams played.”
Dev confirmed that a new Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy will be built from scratch in the next 18 months. “We have also signed an MOU with Gopichand academy. Work should start in about three months. We have identified a piece of land, we will build the supporting infrastructure and then hand it over to Gopichand to run it,” said Dev.
“We are very clear that we will not get into running academies, we would like a professional management team to come and take over the running of the academy like Gopichand for badminton.”
SPORT CLIMBING
With sport climbing scheduled to make its debut at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the Odisha government is looking ahead and has already set up a “facility of its kind” for the sport.
“We have already conducted national level camps there,” concluded the official.
‘BAD SCIENCE COMES FROM ANECDOTES’
He cites the example of three members of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning team who developed Alzheimer’s disease — Martin Peters, 74, and Ray Wilson and Nobby Stiles, both deceased.
“The problem is that bad science comes from anecdotes and they are all we have got,” he said. “Anecdotes are quite persuasive as quite a lot of the 1966 winning team have dementia and other teams have been brought forward with high rates of dementia but we don’t fully understand.”