No More National Trainers to Train by Cook

The senior Asian Wrestling Championships had ended on April 28 in China and since then India’s foreign coach Andrew Cook has been in Lucknow without any wrestlers to train. The camp for senior team was rescheduled to begin on 1 June but the camp for junior team has been delayed. After knowing that the national camp for the cadet team will begin from May 10, Mr. Andrew Cook had a sigh of relief as now he would have been able to resume training at Sports Authority of India, Lucknow.

However, it came as a surprise or shock to Mr. Cook that he was not in the list of the coaches in the national camp by the Wrestling Federation of India. Not only this but he had been shaken by another shock when he was not allowed to eat at the SAI center because he was not officially on the list of people sanctioned for cadet national camp. The WFI hired the former USA coach to train women’s freestyle wrestlers with a monthly salary of $4500. Cook wrote and an email to the Wrestling Federation of India, here he expressed his disappointment at not being able train wrestlers of the national team and said that this is not what he was hired for. He wrote that “I am not allowed to eat in the mess hall nor am I working with the cadet team as I’m not on the sanction list that was sent by WFI. I just don’t understand why I’m not doing the job I was asked and contracted to do with the senior women’s team.” Currently, he is doing a job of training a group of beginner wrestlers who have never wrestled at the national level before. The WFI, however has defied logic from Sports Authority of India as they claim that they had never written the name of a foreign coach on the official list of campers. They said that Mr. Cook is there to train all teams irrespective of the age-group and that he is the designated coach who is always on duty. But the authorities in Lucknow wanted to have this in written that Mr. Cook is being part of the camp which the WFI did not provide when the camp began. Even in the senior team, four wrestlers have their personal foreign coaches and majorly train outside India. The men’s freestyle and Greco-Roman team also participated in the UWW event and were accompanied by the foreign coaches. Iran’s Hossein Karimi was with the freestyle contingent while Georgia’s Temo Kazarashvili was part of the Greco-Roman team. The national camp for senior women and men is to start on Saturday in Lucknow and Sonipat respectively but there is no confirmation about the same and the camp for junior team is also doubtful after the WFI’s proposal for conducting the camp from June 1 has not been accepted.

By: Anuja Arora

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