Dirty linen, smelly rooms — 2 foreign shooting teams flag poor hospitality
Even before first shots could be fired at the FISU World University Championship Shooting, which officially opened here on Friday, teams from Cyprus and Sweden duelled with dirty linen, smelly rooms and creepy crawlies in the hotel accommodation assigned to them.
Put off by the unhygienic conditions, the teams packed their bags and left for a premier Faridabad hotel, touted in the championship bulletin as the facility housing all visiting teams, where they staged a sit-in. The teams stayed put in the lounge area of the hotel until they were assigned clean rooms at a different facility.
Clair Charalambous, heading the Cyprus contingent, confirmed his team had to wait for hours before they could get new accommodation.
“The official bulletin stated that our accommodation was to be in Taj Vivanta in Faridabad, but we were taken to a different hotel this morning. The rooms there were dirty. We spotted cockroaches and immediately drove back to Taj, where we were denied accommodation. They then promised us rooms, but we are now being shifted to another hotel,” Charalambous told The Tribune.
The team has now been housed at Eros Hotel. “My only concern was that my team got a nice room to recharge after shooting at the range. Anyway, the issue has now been resolved,” he said.
The Association of Indian Universities (AIU) had won the bid to host the championship in association with Manav Rachna University, Faridabad.
The hosts had to deal with a similar situation on Thursday when the Great Britain team refused to leave the Karni Singh Shooting Range, venue for the championships, after finding out about shoddy accommodation.
AIU joint secretary Baljit Singh Sekhon could not be reached for comment. Sarkar Talwar, Manav Rachna’s director of sports, said the teams had raised the issue and they had been accommodated at different hotels. “Some teams requested us to change their accommodation and it has been done. They are all being taken care of,” he clarified.
