I t may take a long time for Nigerian Sports to get things right again and win laurels at the Summer Olympic Games following administrators’ lukewarm attitude towards raising a formidable squad for the country.
After Team Nigeria’s poor show at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil, Nigerian Sports is still struggling to put things right for the next Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.
Since 1952 when it first featured at the Helsinki Games in Finland, the administrators are yet to find their bearing in sports development. No lesson has been learnt from the country’s previous ‘poor show’ in the Olympics.
Nigerian athletes have won a total of 24 medals, mostly in athletics and boxing. The national football team won the gold medal at the Atlanta 1996 Games while Chioma Ajunwa won another gold in long jump.
In 2008, following the International Olympic Committee’s decision to strip the American 4 × 400 metres relay team of their medals after American sprinter, Antonio Pettigrew confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs, their Nigerian rivals were awarded the gold medal few years after the Games.
The medals were given to the 4×4 metres relay team of Nduka Awazie, Fidelis Gadzama, Clement Chukwu, Jude Monye, late Sunday Bada and Enefiok Udo-Obong of Sydney 2000 Games.
Nigeria also won a medal in the heavyweight division of taekwondo at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona; as this was only a demonstration sport, Emmanuel Oghenejobo’s silver did not count as an official win.
Nigeria will be making a return to Tokyo where it won a silver medal in 1964 through Nojeem Mayegun in boxing, with no appreciable progress to improve the country’s record in Olympic participation. Instead, Nigeria is so occupied with preparations to elect new officers to spearhead activities in various sports federations. June 13 has been fixed for the elections in Abuja.
According to records, Nigeria has won three gold, nine silver and 12 bronze medals since 1952 and sports followers are not excited about the country’s position and lack of vision by the government to fully invest in sports.
Nigerian government has never seen Sports as a big business and it has never appointed administrators who have passion to manage the Ministry of Sports for once.
Sports enthusiasts across the country had urged administrators to learn from how United Kingdom went back to the drawing board before it could get things right for the country.
Twenty years ago, Britain’s athletes returned from the Olympics branded as the “team of shame.”
Britain had won only one gold medal at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, and finished 36th in the Olympic medal table, below Kazakhstan, Algeria and Ireland.
At the Rio Games, though, Britain was second, with 27 gold medals, behind only the United States’ 46 and ahead of China’s 26. Britain’s gold medal count was also higher than the country’s combined total from the six Games from 1976 to 1996, and the highest tally it has ever recorded in an Olympics not staged in London.
Over all, the United States took home 121 medals, China 70 and Britain 67.
Huge investment is at the heart of Britain’s recent success: It finished 10th on the medals table in 2000 and 2004, fourth in 2008 and third in 2012. After Britain’s performance at the 1996 Olympics, it decided to invest funds raised from the national lottery into elite sports, to improve Britain’s prospects of performing well in the Games.
About three-quarters of Britain’s Olympic funding comes from the national lottery, making it immune from the cuts that have affected much of the government’s spending since 2008.
In total, funding for Summer Olympic sports has risen to 350 million British pounds in 2016, or about $460 million, from 59 million British pounds, or about $77.5 million, in 1996.
While British athletes who had won medals received grants of about $5,200 a year in 1996, today, athletes who have earned a podium level finish at the Games receive up to about $37,000 a year from U.K. Sport, which allocates funding for the Games, to contribute to their living and personal sporting costs.
U.K. Sport also gives leading athletes support worth about $47,000 to about $79,000, which is spent on coaching and training. Each medal that Britain won in Rio has cost, on average, more than $6.5 million.
Britain not only has spent huge amounts on achieving Olympic success but also has been meticulous in how the funding is used.
According to the former Athletics Federation of Nigeria board member Brown Ebewele, Nigeria is planning to make the mockery of herself in front of the whole world by going to the Olympics without any hope of winning a medal.
“Nigerians are dreamers. This is a country of magicians. You will be surprised that you just wake up during the Olympics and hear that Nigeria has won a gold in an event nobody thought it would win a medal.I don’t even know if the Sports Minister, Solomon Dalung knows the date of the Olympics, I stand to be corrected on that. The man does not know anything about the games and I am surprised that he is a Sports Minister of this country.
There are no preparations, no training tours, no funds, no blueprint for a successful outing, so tell me how Nigeria would excel in the Olympics. I think it is a mission impossible for Team Nigeria,” Ebewele said. ‘Jujuman’ said Nigerians should not just place their hope on Team Nigeria because they would inflict them with heart attack.
He described the issue of Nigeria’s participation at the next Olympics ‘as a hopeless debate’ and warned that nobody should allow him or herself to be used as a scapegoat for Nigeria’s failure anymore. It is generally believed that Nigeria’s present economic situation is also part of the clog in the wheel of progress of the nation’s sporting vehicle and only the hand of God can change things for the better.
Nigerian government has never seen Sports as a big business and it has never appointed administrators who have passion to manage the Ministry of Sports for once
“It is unfortunate that Nigerian athletes are preparing for the games under poor condition, while other competitors are enjoying the best welfare package to motivate their athletes for excellent performance. We need to change our orientation to get things right in Nigerian sports. We are just going to the Olympics for jamboree,” he said.
