Why NSC has abolished foreign training for Team Nigeria - Yakmut
THE Director General of the National Sports Commission, Malam Alhassan Saleh Yakmut has said Nigerian athletes for the 2015 All Africa Games in Congo will prepare at home because taking them aboard would amount to waste of scarce resources. Speaking to
yesterday, the sports administrator said based on technical wisdom and economic cost efficiency, the NSC has decided to set up camps in the country for athletes.
He said even as Team Nigeria will not go on foreign training tour, arrangements have been made by the commission for the athletes to take part in international competitions that would help test their fitness and skills.
The DG also said the NSC would where necessary invite and hire technical experts to come and train the athletes here in the country.
He added that athletes have nothing to worry about as their daily camping allowances would be paid to them even as they would not be going overseas for training.
“The technical wisdom and economic cost efficiency of going on training tour has been found to be a little bit suspect. So we have amended that.
“We have moved from sports tourism to only international tune up matches. Nigerian athletes would attend international tournaments to test their fitness, tactics and techniques.
“When they return to camp, they would then analyse their performance and correct their errors for the games proper”.
Yakmut explained further that preparing Nigerian athletes abroad only enriched the host countries as huge sums of money were spent in the name of sports tourism.
“Over the years we ended up turning around the economies of other countries by taking a huge number of athletes for overseas camping and you come back to the same facilities that you do not have.
“The primary objective of every athlete is to get the enabling environment to win medals. And the primary objective of every administrator is to ensure that that is not done at an exorbitant price.
“If we have the opportunity to meet the objective of the athletes and that of the administrators, we would have been able to achieve our objective at a reasonable cost”.
Yakmut therefore said Team Nigerian athletes would be camped at three locations namely Lagos, Ibadan and Abuja where the high performance hostel was recently commissioned.