Atlanta '96 Olympic gold medalist, Chioma Ajunwa, is of the view that the National Sports Festival (NSF) has lost the glamour and excitement associated with it hence the need for it to be re-packaged. According to her, the country stands to reap more if the festival is thrown open for all athletes to participate instead of being closed. In this chat with GOWON AKPODONOR, Ajunwa, a senior police officer, also suggested that to revitalise sports in the country, the quality of administrators must be looked into.FOR 'Golden Girl', Chioma Ajunwa, putting a ceiling on the number of editions of the National Sports Festival athletes should compete in remains an untoward practice that should be jettisoned.'The National Sports Festival is our mini Olympic Games and it makes no sense to restrict athletes appearance at the festival to three,' she told The Guardian during the week in Lagos.'If we wererestricted in our active days, majority of us wouldn't have made it at the Olympic Games. In fact, many Nigerians would not have heard of the likes of the Innocent Egbunike, Chidi Imoh, Falilat Ogunkoya, Mary Onyali and many others.I believe that athletes should be allowedto compete and showcase their endowments at any given time. From there, the coaches can pick as many athletes as they want for competitions. Limiting the number of times an athletes should compete at the sports festival has made nonsense of the exercise.'She claimed that making the NSF closed was the prime reason many states were only interested in poaching athletes, instead of grooming them for future challenges.'When a state goes round the country to buy athletes for the sake of winning the sports festival, how do you expect sports to grow in this country' All the states should have their sports councils in functional condition for our sports fortunes to improve. As it is now, not much is happening in majority of the states. So we need to go back to the grassroots because that is where I was discovered.'We need to revive local government competitions, organise competitions at the state and national levels and ultimately throw the NSF open. That is how talented athletes in my days were discovered.'When I was an active sprinter, Iremember there wasa guy that went to Commonwealth Games with us.That boy just came into the camp one morning when we were preparing for trials. He had never run competitively. He told us he would like to participate in the trials. Eventually, he performed better than some people that were in camp and later turned out to be a fantastic athlete. He was making it in 100m and 200m and he ran with us until we retired. That is what we are talking.She stressed further that by making the festival closed, many athletes have been prevented from making it to the top of their career. 'I am saying this because the system has forced many states to throw away some athletes after participating in just three major competitions. Since every state wants instant result at the festival, the officials go from one state to the other buying athletes.'When you buy athletes, they just give you the medals, but there is nobody to nurtured them to the point of representing Nigeria. If the festival is thrown open and athletes given the chance to compete as many times as they can, states would be interested in keeping the athletes on a long term basis and paying them salaries. In that way, our athletes will do better because they are being taken care of.She lamented that 'Most local athletes do not have the money to train on their own. But by the time we throw the festival open, you will discover that many local athletes, who had participated in two or three festivals will have the courage to face the foreign-based athletes during preparations for major competitions.'Ajunwa also expressed disappointment that the National Sports Commission (NSC) does not deem it necessary to engage the services of many ex-internationals in preparing the country's athletes for the forthcoming London 2012 Olympics.She said: 'Anyone, who fails to plan is planning to fail.Olympic is a global event that everybody needs to prepare adequately. So it beats my imagination when we don't prepare well for an outing as big as the Olympic Games. This simply amounts to killing sports in the country. I believe that if we have people that are knowledgeable in sports and have the interest of sports at heart, they will know exactly what to do to excel atinternational competitions.
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