‘Foreign-based athletes should expect stiff competition from home-based counterparts during trials’
The Technical Director of Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN), Sunday Adeleye, says foreign-based athletes will not be able to easily pick tickets to global tournaments as before.
Adeleye said yesterday in Abuja that this would be due to the AFN board’s progrmmes for the athletes’ homebased counterparts.
He said the AFN board has come up with programmes that would help to discover hidden athletics talents while creating the platform for improvement through competitions.
“The era of having only foreign-based athletes representing the country at global tournaments will soon become a thing of the past. At least five home-based athletes will reverse that trend.
“The current AFN board is very conscious of the abundance of talented athletes in every corner of the country and it has been engaging stakeholders on how to harness them.
“We are now partnering with coaches and other technical officials in various states in our quest to identify the gifted athletes and train them further for global relevance.
“Also, we observed that home-based athletes mostly are not in their top form during the final trials for major competitions. Hence, the foreign-based athletes always take the shine off them.
“That is why we came up with the idea of starting the 2018 athletics calendar in November through the National All-Comers meet, followed by the first Golden League and Commonwealth Trials,” the AFN board member said. (NAN)