Karachi, Aug 21 - More than six years after launching a multi-million-rupee campaign to groom future champions, Pakistan Olympic Association (POA) President Arif Hasan has conceded that the country has little or no hope of winning an Olympic medal in 2012 in London.
Hasan said that Pakistan's slim hopes of winning a medal in the 2010 London Olympics are pinned on hockey -- the sport that fetched the country all its four gold medals.
Back in 2003, Hasan launched a countrywide campaign to find and train future Olympic heroes and pumped in hundreds of millions of rupees into the project that was funded by the government and a lottery scheme. A new organisation under the banner of Pakistan Sports Trust (PST) was launched.
However, the standard of sports only worsened during Hasan's tenure. Pakistan failed to even come close to winning a medal in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and fared even poorly in the 2008 Olympiad in Beijing.
Things look gloomy for Pakistan ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games in London as there are little hopes of many sports persons qualifying for the quadrennial spectacle.