The chairperson of Nigeria Women Football League (NWFL), Nkechi Obi has showered accolades on what she described as a business conscious drive that has been introduced into the country by a new management team that is now in the National Sports Commission (NSC).
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Sports247.ng reports that the NWFL boss aired her views in an expository and progressive manner, as she spoke ahead of a forthcoming Sports Investment Summit and pointed out differences that can be seen between gains achieved by Kenya at par with those of Nigeria.
While welcoming the advent of a new initiative by the NSC’s new board, under the chairmanship of Mallam Shehu Dikko, Obi also advocated a situation in which Nigeria would concentrate on a few medal-winning events at the Olympic Games, instead of always going for a jamboree.
Obi stated further on Arise TV, “It’s the recognition that there’s more to sports than running and jumping. For more than 60 years, we’ve focused on participating in multi-sporrs events. So, every time we draw the budget, it’s about athletes going to the Olympics, to the World Cup, or going to various sports championships; but we never look at the back-end.
“We see other countries winning tonnes of medals, and we are not winning those medals. We never stopped to interrogate ourselves why.”
She then gave an insight into reasons why Kenya has been able to outshine Nigeria in terms of winning medals at the Olympic Games, which she opined is mostly due to their ability to specialise in long distance running.
Obi added, “For example, we started going to the Olympics at the same time with Kenya, and 2026 will make it 72 years or so. Kenya has won over 130 medals, of which about 50 are gold medals, but we have just three, and no one has bothered to interrogate why.
“Kenya has 20,000 centres for training, special centres for long distance training … 20,000 … That means they’ve got a back-end. Kenya Running developed two new cities where the real estate rate is higher than any other city in their country. Kenya got World Athletics to endorse two facilities in their country as world class high performance centres, out of only seven that can be found globally. Why? Because they have a back-end.
“Kenya’s Olympic participation starts in week two of the Games. These days, they don’t bother about boxing or any other sport. They just count their medals from week two; while we are all over the place … some days for gymnastics, some days for horse racing.
“We are Jack of all trade, and we have participated in 24 sports, but yet we have only three gold medals to show. So, in terms of spreading our joy, we have not been able to maximise that spread, and there is no back-end.”
She then concluded with a suggestion on how to take Nigeria out of the woods into the clime and ilk of gold medal winning nations at the Olympic Games.
“This country needs over 8,000 sports development communities, but we have less than a thousand. So, how are you going to get the progression from raw talent to finished product? But, what is happening now is an encouragement, as the federal government is moving into industrialisation and there is a focus on sports economy. That is the business of sports, which will drive the participation level into achievements,” Obi posited.
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