By IANS,
Chandigarh : Students of a school here, which is the alma mater of India’s first Olympics individual gold medallist marksman Abhinav Bindra, Wednesday sent a request to various media organisations to provide adequate coverage to lesser-known sports like archery, fencing, gymnastics, rowing and shooting.
A formal request signed by hundreds of students from St. Stephen’s School, Chandigarh, was sent to editors of newspapers and television channels here. They have requested them to help promote sports other than cricket by giving appropriate coverage.
“On every channel or newspaper, cricket has the maximum share among various sports. We are not saying that they should discard cricket but want that they should also give some attention to other conventional sports. They should cover them irrespective of the commercial value,” Harold Carver, St. Stephen’s School principal told IANS.
“Even sports like football, lawn tennis, badminton and our national sport hockey are not covered properly by the media. We understand that they cannot devote the whole episode or entire pages for these sports but whatever little they cover will certainly help for the betterment of sports,” added Carver.
St. Stephens’ is the alma mater of Abhinav Bindra, India’s first Olympics individual gold medallist — in shooting — at the Beijing Olympics in Aug 2008.
Media coverage will act as a motivation for our budding sportspersons. It will also help to attract sponsors, bringing better infrastructure and lucrative prize money in these sports, said Carver.
“This is our gesture to push the media to contribute to boosting sports in the region. We are very enthusiastic that one of our former school students has won the Olympics gold medal and we are also determined to repeat such kind of performance in other events,” said a young football player who studies in class 8 in St. Stephen’s School.