Sports Excellence Needs To Be Rewarded
First things first! Congratulations, Letsile Tebogo for the gold (100m) and silver (200m) medals you brought from the Under-20 World Championships! And, congratulations to Anthony Pesela for the 400-metre gold medal.
We will be looking forward to seeing you, your coaches and indeed colleagues you travelled with to Kenya, be rewarded by the government and the private sector.
After sending Batswana to the Olympics for the last 40 years, it was only in 2012 that we got a medal, and it was through athletics. One would have thought that administrators would immediately be inspired to create more stars and invest more in athletics.
We acknowledge the bronze medal brought home by the 4x400m relay team, however, we feel that more should be done to improve the code.
We should by now be having a refined incentive structure to encourage children to venture into sports. Why are we only coming out now to offer them houses? Where are the houses? Where is the budget coming from?
All this should be well documented and followed. Go bina go tsholwa should be left for corporates. They will also follow suit and invest more in sports if we get consistent results.
While we have small amounts reserved for senior sport people attaining international medals, all we do for junior sport people is congratulate them. It is time we start showing them from a young age that good performance is rewarded. We need to motivate them with prizes such as sports scholarships, houses and money amongst others.
It would be remiss of all of us to forget where it all started, grassroots development. It is high time the country builds a high-performance sports centre to develop athletes. While we wait to implement that, sporting clubs of performing codes like athletics should be supported with resources by the government to ensure they get dignified preparations.
The Ministry of Basic Education should also be involved in making school environments accommodative of students excelling in sporting activities. Teachers who assist in moulding these stars should also get the requisite support and incentives. School calendars should acknowledge and accommodate sporting activities without treating them as after school hobbies.
We further call on companies, parents, teachers, coaches, administrators and indeed athletes to hold hands and work towards improving their various sporting codes.
It is high time we treat sports as more than just a hobby. Well done to all the sportspeople who continue to do their best to represent the country during these trying times!