NOC to reconsider IOC Scholarships – Priority to Cooray and Rajasekara

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National Olympic Committee will call a special meeting this week to reconsider the scholarships which have been granted to Sri Lankan athletes targeting next Rio Olympics 2016.

This was after numerous media reports highlighted the fact that the two marathoners, Anuradha Cooray and Niluka Rajasekara who are the only ones in the country to have achieved qualification for 2016 Rio Olympic so far, have been overlooked in the said scholarship. NOC have granted scholarship of 1,500 USD per month to shuttler Niluka Karunaratne and 1,000 USD per month each to another four athletes, yet none of the said five have qualified for the Olympics. Similarly, it’s unclear what made Karunaratne so special that he had been granted 500 USD per month extra than other four athletes.

Nevertheless, as per the source inside NOC, NOC Chief Hemasiri Fernando had ordered this meeting to reconsider these scholarships, where NOC is set to ask for maximum scholarships for both marathoners from the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The said scholarship granted by IOC was distributed among the athletes who qualified for the next Olympics in the past. Current Athletics Association Chief, Sugath Thilakaratne said both he and Damayanthi Darsha had been granted these scholarships in the same year and they didn’t have to go behind authorities to get those, unlike today.

Yet recently the practice had taken a U- turn when NOC granted the scholarship of 1,000 USD per month last year to Australian based pole-vaulter Mudith Jayasekara, who is yet to represent the country even once, which is followed by the present incident of omitting two athletes who had achieved qualifying standards from the scholarship list.

This raised eye brows of many of the intentions of the country’s NOC, which had resulted in NOC Chief Hemasiri Fernando calling this meeting on Wednesday to resolve the matter.