Band 6+: Some countries achieve international sports by building specialised facilities to train top athletes, instead of providing sports facilities that everyone can use. Do you think this is positive or negative development? Discuss both views and give your opinion.

Numerous nations are becoming successful at the international platform by providing training to their best athletes instead of working on improving facilities for everybody. I am of the opinion that it has many drawbacks and it will be justified in the following paragraphs.

First and foremost, many nations are nowadays focussing on building facilities to train a few athletes for international competitions. Therefore, people who have inborn talents can only reach the top of the list and can get further training for the bigger events. As a result, only a few will be rewarded with the training and others who could have performed better with some guidance will not be able to do so. And they will fell devastated and dejected. Moreover, they will lose hope and may start looking for another option for living. For instance, only 11 players can play in an international team of any country and only 16 gets an opportunity to be selected in a team. These numbers are too less to motivate other players to work hard on their own to vie for the national team.

In addition to that, if facilities at ground level are not improved then soon the craze for sports will be lost and very few people would try to play in the national team. This reduction in passion will ultimately affect the quality of the players at the national level and hence this will hamper their success at international platforms. To exemplify, in a developing country such as India, approximately 80% of children play some games and this reduces to 10% when they cross adolescents and hardly 1 % amongst them try to pursue their career in sports. It is just because of the negligence of sports facilities and training at ground level; they start losing their interest in sports.

To conclude, although many nations have tasted success in international competitions by just focussing on their best athletes, this trend is temporary. People will start losing their interest in games if do not get attention from governments in terms of facilities and soon it will have a huge negative impact on the talent of athletes.