Saadi Abbas to miss Karate 1 Premier League

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ISLAMABAD, Oct 15 (APP):Pakistan’s top Karateka Saadi Abbas would miss the Karate 1 Premier League scheduled to be held in Madrid next month, as to participate in the National Games and South Asian Games.

“Saadi would be coming to Pakistan on October 26 for participation in the 33rd National Games to be held in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa this month. After that he would be going in the 13th South Asian Games to take place in Kathmandu and Pokhara in December,” Pakistan Karate Federation (PKF) Chairman Muhammad Jahangir told APP.

Jahangir said the country comes first and hopefully Saadi would bag gold medals in the mega events. Speaking about the remaining 2020 Tokyo Olympic qualifiers, Jahangir said Saadi was to feature in a number of rounds to improve his ranking and then the final Olympic qualification round would be held in Paris in May.

“The rounds would be held in Dubai in February, Austria and Morocco in March, Spain in April,” he said and added the federation was doing all efforts to support the two-time Commonwealth Karate Championships gold medalist Saadi. Saadi’s Olympics ranking is 19. He needs to be among the top five to make it to the next year’s Olympics.

However, Jahangir said the federation was still awaiting to hire the services of a Turkish coach for Saadi in preparation for the Olympic qualifiers.

“We wrote to the Pakistan Sports Board (PSB) more than two months ago, for roping in a foreign Turkish coach to better prepare our only Olympic hope Saadi, but we have not yet received any reply from them,” he said.

Jahangir said PSB had asked us to forward the requirements for hiring the Turkish coach and we did so two months ago, but no development on the matter has been done yet.

“Only the coach of the team can make a request to the referee for an immediate review of the video replay in the case of an objection to a judgement of the refereeing officials during the Karate contest as long as they have an appeal quota,” he said and added that PSB needs to understand how important was the role of a coach in the game. To a question, he said top coaches’ charges up to US$ 4,000 per month.

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