'My dream is to help OGQ athletes get the best of everything'

India are perennial under-achievers when it comes to sport. A country with a population of nearly 1.2 billion has struggled to produce champions on big stages like the Olympics despite a blooming economy and huge population base.

For an athlete to make it big in individual sports, it seems nearly impossible with the lack of infrastructure and funds, especially in rural areas. Abhinav Bindra is the first Indian win an Olympic gold medal, in the last edition of the Games in Beijing in 2008. But hailing from a rich family, the ace shooter had all the resources at his disposal, including a shooting range in his backyard.

An Indian athlete has to literally beg, borrow or steal, and most of the times fight the system or association, in quest to become the next big star.

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But hope has arrived in the form of the Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ), which is grooming and training Indian athletes to win Olympic gold medals. The organisation was founded by India's sporting legends Prakash Padukone and Geet Sethi in 2006, with the vision of producing Olympic champions.

India's former hockey star Viren Rasquinha took over as the Chief Operating Officer at OGQ in 2008 and since then the organisation is sprinting towards its dream of winning gold medals.

The first step of the dream has been achieved already, with 10 OGQ athletes having qualified for the London Games. Rasquinha believes another 10 can make the cut. It is not only the Olympic-bound athletes who the OGQ supports, but also youngsters at the grassroot level, who have shown the potential to make it big in the future.

Rasquinha's commitment to OGQ is unmatched and he personally keeps track of every activity, ranging from funding to training of athletes or tracking coaches or arranging for equipment.

Harish Kotian caught up with the former India hockey captain in a rare free moment at his residence in Bandra to discuss OGQ's vision, the mode of operation and why he is so passionate about creating India's next Olympic champion.

You have been working as Chief Operating Officer with Olympic Gold Quest for more than two years now. Can you explain what your role involves?

It is a small organisation and our full-time working team is just five employees. My role is really a bit of everything; I am everything from the peon to the president. I do everything from fund-raising to player management in terms of what can be done to improve their performances. I liaison a lot with the players to figure out how we can improve their performance, what kind of support we can provide them at a faster pace.

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My two key goals are the fund-raising part and helping the players improve their performances, because at the end of the day the mission of the Olympic Gold Quest is to win Olympic gold medals. That is our key focus area and that is where my area of expertise lies. That is what I like, working directly with the players and finding out how to improve their performance.

Since taking over as COO, are you happy with the way the organisation has shaped with regard to grooming athletes to be future World or Olympic champions?

Of course, I am very happy with everything. The reason I joined the Olympic Gold Quest in the first place was because of the team that was already onboard in terms of the board of directors. Geet Sethi and Prakash Padukone are the founders of Olympic Gold Quest and they are two of the most legendary and credible sportsperson in India; to get an opportunity to work with them is just fantastic.

We also have Leander Paes and Viswanathan Anand on the board of directors; again two fabulous sportsperson who need absolutely no introduction. Even on the corporate side there is Shitin Desai, Neeraj Bharadwaj, R Ramraj, Rakesh Khanna and Neeraj Bajaj. It is a fantastic team to be working with.

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I am very happy because when we started two-and-half years ago we had just two or three athletes. But, today, Olympic Gold Quest is looking after the training and preparation of 32 athletes who are trying to make it to the 2012 Olympics. We already have 10 athletes who have qualified for the London Olympics, and if things go well then we might have 10 more athletes qualifying for the Games. But I am sure that we will have at least 15 athletes going to the Olympics next year. The rest of the athletes are all young athletes whom we are grooming for 2016 and 2020 Games.
 
The other thing I am very happy about is that we have put up very stringent merit-based processes in place for the selection of our OGQ athletes; so that has been streamlined and has been well-taken care of. The funding has improved and even the awareness of OGQ has improved much more.

Another major factor, which I feel has been a big factor in the success of OGQ so far, is the ability of OGQ to work very closely within the system. We work closely with the national sports federation, with the government and the Sports Ministry. We are not a parallel body and that is something we are proud of, because we are not fighting with the system, but working with it.

You said you are targeting around 20 OGQ athletes qualifying for the London Olympics. What's the support in terms of preparing them for the mega-event that OGQ will provide them?

The kind of support we give the athletes differs from sport to sport; it differs from athlete to athlete. For example, in a sport like shooting, for some shooters equipment in terms of their weapons and ammunition is very important; for some shooters, the mental training part is very important. So we really have to identify the area where the athlete needs the support the most and that is what we really do to help.

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Like for MC Mary Kom in boxing, where the athlete gets injured from time to time and there are lots of aches and pain all the time due to the nature of the sport, we have a lady physiotherapist who is with Mary all the time. The main head of our sports medicine team Dr Nikhil Latey, who is a fabulous sport scientist and physiotherapist, travels with Mary almost all the time. So we ensure that her needs are taken care of all the time.

How do you keep track of the preparation of your athletes and coaches across various disciplines and across the country?

First of all, I have got a very good research team, which is constantly tracking the performances of all the athletes in various competitions. I travel almost 20 days in a month -- I am constantly travelling to all the training venues. I feel that it is very important for me to be involved in the training aspect even more than the competitions because the hard work is actually done at the training camp. And that is where you find out the problems and the challenges that the athlete is facing. So I travel to Patiala, where the men boxers train; to Bhopal, where the women boxers train.

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Then, we also support the PT Usha School of Athletics in Kozhikode. All our five badminton players currently train at the Pullela Gopichand Academy in Hyderabad; our archers are training in Kolkata. So I travel a lot to the camps and interact with the coaches and athletes and try to figure out where the gaps are currently and how OGQ can fill in the gaps quickly and make an impact.

How do you motivate your athletes when they are going through a bad run? For instance, Saina Nehwal has struggled in 2011. How do you ensure that Saina, who is one of the top badminton players in the world, returns back to her best form ahead of the Olympics?

This is an excellent question. Probably the big part that helps in this case is that I have been there myself as a player and I know for a fact that even the top players in the world will go through a sustained bad patch at some point in their career. The key thing in this case is to be positive, to have belief in yourself and third never let the work ethic dwindle.

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I think Saina is too good a player to really get too worried about a bad patch or form. Yes, this year she has been going through a tough time and it is easy to lose faith quickly, but we know we just need to work hard. She is losing a lot of close matches right now, but the good news is that she has stayed positive and she does not have any major injuries at the moment.

Probably, she is not as sharp as she was last year in terms of her fitness, and that is where she losing out a bit. We are trying to do everything possible in the background to ensure that mentally she prepares well for a tournament and stays positive. And, I said, she is too good a player to lose out for long.

You were one of the leading hockey players in your time, but never came close to winning an Olympic medal. So, for you personally, how important is it that the OGQ athletes succeed and win medals at the Olympics?

For me it was a dream to win an Olympic medal. I played at the Athens Olympics in 2004, where India came seventh. So, for me, the dream to win the Olympic medal continues through Olympic Gold Quest, and I am thankful to Geet Sethi, Prakash Padukone and the board of OGQ for giving me the opportunity to let me live my dreams through OGQ.

Now my dream is to help our athletes get the best of everything, because I don't want someone to say tomorrow that we missed out on the Olympic medal because we didn't have the right kind of rifle or because the ammunition was not good enough or because there was a physiotherapist lacking.

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I will be the happiest person in the world if our OGQ athletes win medals at the Olympics and make our nation proud.