Aside the
allegation of bribery that rocks the appointment of Lars Lagerback as
the Super Eagles coach, a subject that is generating intense debate in
the sports circle is Nigeria’s preparation for the New Delhi 2010
Commonwealth Games scheduled for October.
After an
unimpressive performance at the Melbourne 2006 Games, officials and
managers of Team Nigeria promised us that preparation for the New Delhi
Games will start immediately, but a few months to the Games, athletes
and coaches are worried that no adequate preparation has been put in
place. They argued that unless something is done fast, our team will
record woeful performance in India.
Ken Anugweje, a medical doctor and president of Nigerian Universities Games Association thinks otherwise.
Anugweje, a PHD
holder in sports medicine and an academician at the University of Port
Harcourt, said camping athletes for months is not the same as adequate
preparation.
Anugweje, who is a
member of the board of Athletics Federation of Nigeria, believes that
athletes are better when they work individually.
Camping is not preparation
“From my
experience, preparation for Games is not all about camping. In Nigeria,
we tend to elevate camping to a level that is very unreasonable. I
don’t intend that a Olusoji Fasuba should come and stay in Nigeria; to
be trained by whom? Modern sports training has been reduced to very
simple times called periodization and this entails that you must
prepare for every event, breaking your training into compartments
called periods. You don’t expect somebody who is training for
Commonwealth Games in October to start now to prepare for those Games.
It means that the person will not take part in any other intervening
competition, so what we are saying is that if there are Golden League
competition to go, the person now sits down and say I want to be at my
peak performance by May.”
The European Indoor Circuit
Anugweje has been
following the performances of our athletes in the European Indoor
Circuit. He speaks on athletes and how they prepare for tournaments “I
saw Franca Idoko run at the indoor competition, although she did poorly
but it’s part of her preparation, maybe she had not peaked before this
time but I think if she has a good training programme she will keep
improving until that day. The AFN was trying to start a training camp
at Ijebu Ode, I don’t know how advisable that camp is because I know
that for maximum training, athletes insist on having personalized
coaches. Your coach may be having one, two or three athletes at the
maximum and they have their training programme so many of them will be
very reluctant to come to camp. They will prefer staying with their
coaches and that is what I’m seeing now. I’m in contact with very many
national athletes and they tell me they are training with their
coaches, they don’t want to toil around with their training programme.
I bet that by summer the preparations for the Commonwealth Games will
be obvious to everybody.
Training grants
With most of our
athletes from humble background, training without financial assistance
from the government has been a source of worry, but he explained that
“Patrick Ekeji, the Director General of National Sports Commission is a
very strong advocate of training grants. I know that in this year’s
budget we have captured those aspects and I’m sure when the time comes,
our top athletes will be given grants. You see you don’t just call a
group of people and start giving money to them.
“But we need to
invest more in schools sports. We have not given sports the right
consideration in Nigeria universities and this not only traceable to
the Nigerian universities, we should also blame the National University
Commission the NUC which is the supervising body for the universities;
we will also blame the ministry of education that ought to give
direction. They have a sport desk in their ministry but they don’t give
us directions even when we initiate programs and project they don’t
really encourage us. But having said that, if we consider the
contribution of NUGA to Nigeria sport, you can see that it is
unprecedented.
“In the last
Beijing Olympics, for instance, every medal that Nigeria won had a NUGA
imprint. The Chukwumerijie chap who won a medal in taekwondo was the
NUGA taekwondo champion in his weight class in the last NUGA games; the
relay quartet that won the bronze medal Franca Idoko was ABU, Blessing
Okagbare is a NUGA athlete, because in world universities games you
represent your country. You don’t represent your university or the
country of study so all four of them were NUGA athletes.
Gloria Kemasouede was in the University of Ibadan she ran for her
university. She ran for NUGA in 1999 at the world University Games so
you can see that everybody who won anything in the last Olympic games
had a NUGA colouration except the soccer team.
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