Nigeria Wrestling Federation President, Daniel Igali, has warned that the country’s hope of winning medals in the wrestling event at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games may be dashed if funds are not provided for the athletes to attend tournaments leading to the Games.
The Sydney 2000 Olympic Games gold medallist urged the country to begin preparations for Rio 2016 early.
“Preparation is key — if we must win medals at the Olympics. We’re still at a point where we can’t do what we want to do in terms of preparations,” Igali told our correspondent on the telephone on Monday.
“Our performance at the Olympics will be determined by how well we take care of the wrestlers during their preparations.
“The Director-General of the National Sports Commission, Al-Hassan Yakmut, is a pragmatic person and is willing to help the team. He assisted us during the preparations for the All Africa Games (in Brazzaville, Congo) by providing more mats for the team in Abuja. We need more assistance ahead of the Olympics.
“There are a lot of tournaments every month that determine the ranking of every wrestler. The wrestlers are ranked based on their participation in tournaments.
“(Brazzaville 2015 gold medallist) Odunayo Adekuoroye and every other wrestlers at the All Africa Games will be ranked next month based on the events they featured in the last month, but they will lose their rankings if they don’t participate in more events.
“They must be competing regularly if they must remain on top. It’s like the FIFA rankings for football. Going into the All Africa Games, none of our athletes was ranked in the top 20 because they didn’t attend competitions.
“If we don’t prepare Adekuoroye well, she may not win an Olympic medal.”
Igali, who dumped Nigeria for Canada after the 1994 Commonwealth Games in the North American country, added, “There’s a tournament in Canada in November, there’s another one in India, there’s one in France in November, about the same time Brazil is hosting one, and another one in the USA in December. So if we want to be ready, we shouldn’t be saying there is no money. We know the level of the tournament and we know who should go there.”
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