Turkmen Sports Teams Yet to Shine

When Nebitchi, a leading football team from Turkmenistan, entered a tournament in St Petersburg to compete against squads from other former Soviet states on January 15, hopes were high that it would do well. Turkmenistan is hosting the Asian Games in 2017, and Nebitchi is its best chance for the football event.

Disappointingly, Nebitchi lost all three initial matches and dropped out of the contest.

An instructor at Turkmenistan’s National Institute for Sport and Tourism said the country’s footballers failed to get past the initial rounds of the Asian Games for years, and had not won medals in the Olympics for years.

Under the current Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov, sports and physical education have seen a revival. In 2008, PE classes were reintroduced in the schools, having been banned by Berdymuhammedov’s predecessor Saparmurat Niazov. The government has also opened a sports school and various clubs, and started building stadiums in every province, and Olympic-level facilities and a winter sports around the capital Ashgabat.

Critics of the government’s sports policy say too much attention is paid to appearances such as new premises and ignore the basics of good training in schools and clubs.

One of the main problems is that so many coaches and trainers have left Turkmenistan.

"There is no one to work with sportsmen,” said a local sports journalist. “Graduates of sports institute are at best capable of working as PE teachers in the schools; they aren’t up to doing anything else."

Many stadiums lie unused, and the outcome of sporting events are often fixed in advanced.

A PE teacher in the eastern town of Turkmenabat said the winners were often decided beforehand even in youth competitions, and adults took the place of children in teams so as to ensure success.

"Until we rid ourselves of the things obstructing the development of proper sport, we aren’t going to see any Turkmen sportspersons winning [international] medals," he said.

This article was produced as part of IWPR's News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.