Gold Quest continues

Gold Quest continues
OGQ founder-director Geet Sethi says Rio Olympics is a bigger challenge for his team.

India’s performance in the Olympics has improved over the last decade and a lot of credit goes to Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ) and the Mittal Champions Trust (MCT). While MCT closed down last year, OGQ has grown in strength.

It is currently helping 43 topflight sportpersons prepare for the 2016 Rio Games. Mirror caught up with the Trust’s founder-director Geet Sethi on the sidelines of a recent function.

Excerpts:

With Rio Games just a year away, how do you look at the journey so far?

The journey started in 2002 when we set up the foundation. From 2002 to 2007 nothing really happened. In 2007, we got board members in place.

Technically, 2008 was our first Olympics. We had two athletes – Vikas Gowda and Gagan Narang – in Beijing. In 2012, we managed four medals. It has been a journey of growth since.

Our first real test was London. Rio would be a bigger challenge as we need to prove ourselves again. It is difficult to predict but we will do better than last time. India should win 8 to 10 medals and OGQsupported athletes should bag 4-6 medals.

What do you think is OGQ’s most important contribution?

Our moto has always been to fill in where there is a requirement. Even the government and the federations know what needs to be done. If we have to look at the problems that hampered India’s rise as a sports power, it would be narrowed down to speed of delivery. Being a smaller organisation, we can provide that.

Indian sports also lacked a proper system of analysis, training. Was that difficult to implement?

I accept we are a lot behind in systems that help evaluate a player’s strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis their opponents. When you have coaches who have their own pedigree, it is a fine line as to how much you can meddle into their working style.

But, nothing succeeds like success. We have proved our concept and players have started believing that if we are involved, there would be something good happening.

We are helping players analyse their performance graphs, career graphs, monitoring their fitness levels. We are putting these processes in place. It is not some secret work we are doing. I hope many more will follow.

But you haven’t really concentrated on the grass-root where the system is really important.

Me and Prakash (Padukone) are two people who like to do one thing very well and concentrate on it. Our board has been discussing the grassroot programme and we are supporting a few youngsters.

But right now, we don’t have the bandwidth or funds to run a complete grass-roots programme. We are currently supporting 65 athletes. I hope we’ll reach over 200 athletes.

Speaking of funds, how sustainable is this entire exercise?

We were always clear from the start that we need to depend on a multiple funding model because when the funds come from one source and something goes wrong – financially or otherwise – then it is difficult to sustain.

So far, we have been happy that our supporters have grown over the years and confident that the support will only increase further.