Old Sylvestrian SC to promote sports

Old Sylverstrians Sports Club under the presidency of U.S.K.Kodituwaku and his able committee are going all-out to help the Sylvestrian sports with all their needs. They also built a dormitory recently for visitng teams to stay. It is the one and only school in the country, if not in the whole world, to have produced a sportsman who was selected to represent two different countries at two different Olympic Games. He is none other than Malcolm Bulner. He was bloomed into a welterweight boxer who represented then Ceylon at the 1962 British Empire (Commonwealth) Games and at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. He later went on to represent Australia in international boxing competitions just after participating in the 1964 Summer Olympics while representing Ceylon. He migrated to Australia where he was selected to represent them at the following Olympic Games, but he was deprived of achieving this feat for technical reasons.

In athletics, the Sylvestrians produced an athlete who broke a Public Schools record and was one of the country’s crack sprinters in Felix Samarawickrema who later crossed over to St. Joseph’s College. He lowered the Public Schools 440 yards sprint with a timing of 10.6 seconds. . Some top athletes did come out of this school. In the 1950s there was Cyril Ranatunge, P. Thangavelu, Ananda Daswatte, GS Fernando, ME Marikar, S.Wickremasuriya, Leslie and Malcolm Marshall, LSB Cabraal, Rodney David, WRP Dias, SB Pattapola and Eric B. Perera.

Football was another popular sport from the 1940s to the 1960s. Some of them played for the country and others for Kandy, and Up-Country Mahinda Aluwihare was the first Sylvestrian to lead the country. The others who shone before Mahinda Aluvihare were N.E Perera, I.M Saheed, Edmund Samaraweera, AHM Jabbar, Jaya Aluvihare, RP Wijesiri, Tony Direckze, Percy Samaraweera, Rukman and Rajendra de Silva, ME Marikar who captained in 1953, Donald G. Labrooy, Abdul Razak, Gerard David, IM Anver, Hector Galuge and M. Ayub. In hockey too, they did well.

In cricket it was ME Marikar who was the first to play in the Premier tournament without playing for the school as there was no cricket at St. Sylvester’s during his school days. He was followed by Abdul Razak the famous Prisons cricketer, Nihal Samarasekera who became the first to play for the Ceylon team before Test status and Ishak Sahabdeen, the first to play for the country after Test status. Later St. Sylvester’s produced a galaxy of cricketers and the man who reached the top In rugby some of the Sylvestrians who played for clubs without playing for the school were Malcolm Marshall, Cyril Aluwihare, Hector Galuge, Sarath Basnayake, Gerard David, Tony Direckez, Nimal Lewke, H. Marikar, Anton Fernando, M. Jamilon, V. Ratnayake, Manjula Pathirana to name a few.

The post Old Sylvestrian SC to promote sports appeared first on DailyNews.