The Nation Newspaper Igali reveals fears for Nigerian wrestling after 2024 Olympics
African Games in Ghana to the gold-rious outing at the African Championships and Paris 2024 qualifiers in Egypt, President of Nigeria Wrestling Federation Dr. Daniel Igali, says the sport may be grounded to a halt in Nigeria if something positive is not done urgently. He speaks with MORAKINYO ABODUNRIN.
More accolades were to come on Day-2 of the African Championships in Alexandria as African Games’ three -time champion Mercy Genesis retained her African Championships title in the 50kg following a dominant display over Ntsa Assouga of Cameroon. To say wrestling has become a second nature to Igali is perhaps stating the obvious following his own storied success as an athlete and first Canada’s only male Olympic medallist in wrestling since the 2000 Summer Olympics, among other career highlights.
“I thank the Lord for the victory today because we’ve been training, but in all of this, I’m so excited for these girls – they deserve it.” Igali said after his go-go female wrestlers carted away six African Games gold. “Also, I like to thank the Governor of Bayelsa State, Douye Diri, for always supporting these athletes; his support enabled us to shine like we did today.”
“When Tunisia won a silver medal at the Olympics in 2016, they were getting over a million dollars every year for four years as budget,” he continues. “Now, Tunisia has a team that will be beating us in the next three or four years because they started investing in their youth like the secondary schools. We may be beating them now, but that is what I foresee.“When Blessing Oborodudu won a silver in 2021 in Tokyo, Japan, we were not given a dime to build our programmes.
“Blessing Oborodudu and Odunayo Adekuoroye will be done after this Olympic Games. Who replace them? We do not have any system in place to groom our secondary school kids to the cadet, junior and senior levels. The crop of good athletes we have now were individually raised by us through our own efforts.
“We can have the system in place. We have the right people in position of authority to be able to do it but we do not have the funding.One other thing that has agitated the minds of Igali apart from general poor funding of sports and wrestling in particular, is the wide gap in reward systems for other sporting federations, asides football for instance.
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