Dinesh Kamath's news 'Navi Mumbai badly needs synthetic track for its athletes' that was published in Newsband

Navi Mumbai badly needs synthetic track for its athletes

By Dinesh Kamath

Above Picture: Synthetic track

NAVI MUMBAI: The athletes of Navi Mumbai have to go outside the city to get themselves trained on performance-enhancing synthetic athletic tracks, as the city does not have any facility for these athletes. There are many sports grounds in the city but not even one of them has an artificial running track.

If only the city had a standard synthetic track, it would have been very helpful to many budding athletes to improve their performance. Currently most of these athletes practice on the ordinary track but when they go for competitions outside the city they perform miserably on the synthetic pitch since they are not used to it.

 Both Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation and City and Industrial Development Corporation should combinedly make such synthetic track available in the city, according to many sportspersons and sports lovers in the city. They question as to what is the point in these budding athletes practicing on ordinary tracks when in the competitions held outside the city they are forced to perform on synthetic tracks where they fail miserably? There are some rich athletes who can afford to go outside Mumbai and practice on synthetic tracks there. But not all athletes can afford this luxury. At least they should be sponsored by the local government.

The city does have clay tracks at some places but practicing on them does not help the athletes to give a reasonably good performance on the synthetic tracks when it comes to participating in competitions outside Navi Mumbai.

Some athletes in Navi Mumbai can afford to go as far as Pune or Kandivali or Napean Sea Road where there are good facilities available for practicing. But if the city had its own artificial turf that would save the athletes the trouble of going to far-away places for practice sessions.

It’s not that the local government is sleeping over this issue. In fact, NMMC and CIDCO are having discussions with the state government to acquire a plot in Ghansoli where they intend to come up with a regional sports complex with an artificial track to help the city athletes conduct their practice sessions. A synthetic track might soon come up even at Rajiv Gandhi stadium. Once the synthetic tracks are constructed in the city, one can expect the city athletes to bring in still more laurels and thus give more boost to the reputation of the city.