Habu Gumel, President of the Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC), on Friday called on sports federations to use the African Games to assess their level of preparedness for the 2024 Olympics.
He charged the federations to test-run their readiness for the 2024 Olympic Games by using the African Games for both qualification and awareness.
A statement by Tony Nezianya, NOC’s Public Relations Officer, said after several postponements, the 13th African Games will finally be hosted by Ghana from March 8 to March 23, 2024, in Accra.
“Before then, the Youth Winter Games will take in Gangwom, South Korea, from Jan. 19 to Feb. 1, 2024. The Games will offer opportunities for more athletes to qualify for the Paris Games.
“Out of the 29 sports at the Accra Games, eight will be Olympic-qualifying, and seven demonstration events.
“It is hoped that Nigeria, which has performed well in past African Games, would use the opportunity to qualify more athletes for the Summer Games in Paris, a city famed as the citadel of love.
“However, currently we have only qualified for eight slots at the Olympics, as revealed. As of today and heading into the Olympic year 2024, our nation has only qualified three in athletics, three in boxing and one each in cycling and wrestling,” Gumel said.
He added that the abysmal level of athletes’ qualification was worrisome.
“This is a far cry from expectations, even though we are still hopeful of qualifying more athletes, especially with our Women’s Basketball and Women’s Football teams still engaged in the qualifying series,” he said.
Gumel noted that some of Nigeria’s talented athletes and teams were missing out because they failed to take part in mandatory qualification events leading to the Olympic Games.
According to him, there is no doubt that the country needs to chart a new course by making a clear departure from the status quo in the drive for better results.
“Right now, the qualification system for both individual and team sports for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games is ongoing and as far as the Olympic Games are concerned, a critical take-off point is the qualification tournaments.
“An obvious point worth mentioning has been that qualifying more athletes would not only brighten the chances for a podium finish but build up Nigeria’s quota for an official team contingent to the Olympic Games,” he said.
The NOC helmsman, therefore, appealed to the Minister of Sports to ensure Nigeria would take part in the African Games as well as other qualifying tournaments to improve the country’s strong presence at the Olympics.
“The failure of any Federation, athlete or team to feature in one or more of the qualification tournaments lined up by the International Federations ahead of the Games would mean automatic self-disqualification from the Olympic Games,” said Gumel.
He, however, said he was certain all parties were committed to the success of the nation and were determined to surpass the 1996 record.
According to him, the ministry has agreed to have another joint meeting of stakeholders.
He said the meeting would offer further opportunities to appeal for the Minister’s goodwill and intervention to ensure that Nigeria’s medal hopefuls in key sports would participate in their programmed Olympic qualifier events.
“There is no doubt that our country has maintained her dominant position, in terms of haulage of medals at the African Games, and we should be more determined to sustain our continental top rating.
“At the last edition of the African Games in Morocco in 2019, Nigeria finished in second position, with a total of 46 Gold, 33 Silver and 48 Bronze medals, behind Egypt which came first, while South Africa was third,” he said.
Gumel urged the Minister to strengthen the Federations and support them with funding as they were critical to the success of the sports sector.
Looking back at Nigeria’s performance at previous Olympics, NOC’s President pointed out that Atlanta’96, where Nigeria won two gold medals, has remained Nigeria’s best outing to date.
‘’We won other medals of other colours but non came close to the 1996 epochal performance,” he said.
Adewale Oladunjoye, president of Nigeria Triathlon Union (NTU) who was at that meeting, said: “To go for qualifiers will require massive funding of teams by the ministry.”
He said even though the Minister had called for collaboration with the private sector, it must be noted that the sector was facing fluctuating fortunes in sourcing scarce foreign exchange to stabilise their businesses.
Many are now asking if the Corporate world is really in a position to support the various sports to the qualifiers.
Brig.-Gen. Oyelade Akinniyi of the Nigeria Boxing Federation also cried out to the Sports Minister to refund the money spent by his federation to attend the qualifiers that yielded the country the three boxing slots at the Olympics.
“We have a few more qualification opportunities. We have approvals awaiting cash backing from the sports ministry,” he said.
Ademola Damilola Daniel, Chairman of the Curling Sports Federation, also called for speedy intervention to support to enable his team travel to participate in the Youth Winter Games in Gangwom, South Korea.
