World’s highest altitute turf at Shilaroo

Shilaroo, a town located 7500 feet above the sea level, now boasts of a hokcey synthetic turf, perhaps the world’s highest altutude one. Not enough, the first activity on the proud possession of state of Himachal Pradesh, is a training camp for the national juniors.

The turf was inaugurated on Tuesday by the sports remormer MS Gill, in the presence of Vidhya Stokes, who is currently a temporary president of Hockey India.

As we all know, this high altitude centre came into prominence in 2003, when Indian camp moved from Lucknow to here with Sampath Kumar as the physical trainer in charge. Dhyanraj had his birthday celebrated, with a half dozen cameras beaming it live across the country, as that time, having won a couple of tournaments, Indian team was high on the media focus.

Incidentally, Shilaroo is her home constituency, and she is now the Opposition Leader of Congress in the state assembly.

It was a great sight on the dais of her seating next to MS Gill, probably the latter is unaware that Stokes is sticking on to women’s hockey president post for a record 26 years!!

MS Gill has recently took a bold step of restricting age and tenure of sports body officials,which is universallay appreciated in India.

Hockey Synthetic turf at 7500 feet height looks like a dream. But has come ture, with the Union Minister for sports, Dr. Manohar Singh Gill inaugurating it at the Sports Authority of India’s High Altitude Training Centre (HATC), Shilaru, Shimla.

HATC Shilaru, situated at 2420 mtr height from sea level was the dream project of late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, approved in 1986, and foundation stone of which was laid in Feb ’1987.

The task was enormous, laying a turf in a thick jungle region, which is undulating terrain morphology.

Probably this is one of the highest synthetic hockey pitch laid above sea level in the world.

Jr. India boys training camp is in progress at Shilaru from 05th of this month, likely to end 30th.

Of course Hockey India is yet to inform us objective and purpose of this camp, and the list of those who are attending it.

Though, we know for sure the coach in charge of the camp is AK Bansal.