The opening ceremony took place yesterday for the 2014 Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing, China.
The second staging of the event brings together athletes from age 15 to 18 from more than 200 nations to compete in 28 sports until August 28.
Among them will be a modest, but hopeful, contingent of four athletes from the UAE.
Yaqoob Al Saadi, Yasmeen Tahlak, Hamad Al Hammadi and Fatima Al Hosani will be the country’s second batch of young Olympians hoping to make the step up to senior level, perhaps even as soon as Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
In 2010 in Singapore the UAE had also entered four athletes.
On his horse Pearl Monarch, Sheikh Ali Abdullah Majid Al Qassimi was involved in individual jumping and finished ninth. He was also fourth in the team jumping event alongside Mohamad Alanzarouti of Syria, Timur Patarov of Kazakhstan, Abdulrahman Marri of Qatar and Pei Chew of Singapore.
In the one-person dinghy, Saif Ibrahim Al Hammadi took part in the Boys’ Byte CII and finished with a ranking of 27, Salem Alqaydi, in the Boys’ 10m Air Rifle, did not advance to the final round, and Haya Jumaa, in the Taekwondo 49-kilogram girls division, lost in the quarter-finals.
The challenge is there for the new generation to surpass those achievements in Nanjing over the next 12 days.
On Tuesday, Yaqoob Al Saadi will start his quest for swimming success in the men’s 50 metres backstroke. Arguably the best young swimmer in the UAE, Al Saadi last August took part in the Fina World Junior Championships in Dubai, a tournament with a high calibre field in which 40 world records tumbled.
Al Saadi, from Al Ain, did not trouble the leading swimmers, but he used the experience to push on and he took gold at the Arab Youth Championships in Jordan later in the year and, in April, secured qualification to Nanjing at the Dubai International Aquatic Championships at the Hamdan Sports Complex.
Now 17, the Youth Olympics are an opportunity for Al Saadi to show how far he has come in the past 12 months and what he can do on the international stage.
Yasmeen Tahlak, 17, is scheduled to take part in the 10m rifle shooting on Wednesday. Nanjing will be a familiar haunt for him as he qualified for these games with a 10th place finish in last year’s Asian Youth Games at the same venue.
Compared to the senior Olympics, these games, and the preparation for them, are relatively low key.
The sample number is small, but participation at this level does not necessarily guarantee future progress. None of the four that took part in Singapore in 2010 made the step up to the senior Olympics two years later in London.
Still, the UAE National Olympic Committee (NOC) has given the youngsters every chance to succeed.
“As you know their ages are almost 18,” said Ahmad Ibrahim, the UAE head of mission in Nanjing. “From our side we [NOC] have given them all the support through our chairman Sheikh Ahmad bin Mohammed and Secretary General Mohammed Al Kamali.”
Tomorrow, Hamad Al Hammadi will follow his 2010 namesake in Byte CII sailing, while on Wednesday, Fatima Al Hosani completes Emirati participation when she takes part in the discus on the first day of athletics competition.
Acknowledging that the Emirati competitors were unlikely to cause any major surprises, Ibrahim said success and failure would not be measured simply on medal counts.
“We focus on their professionalism and their general outcome which are huge in different ways,” he said. “[We judge] through their participation and adapting to a new way of healthy living, with commitment and good behaviour.”
Beyond Nanjing, these four competitors can still to make a name for themselves, provided they keep up their rate of progress. Ibrahim said that is likely. “They will continue training and building themselves up in such a great atmosphere, even if they are finished their competition,” he said.
The next 12 days will go a long way to showing whether we will be seeing more of Al Saadi, Tahlak, Al Hammadi and Al Hosani.
Particularly in 2016 in Rio.
akhaled@thenational.ae
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