By Solomon  Nwoke
ORDINARILY, one would have expected  Bayelsa State’s swimmers and wrestlers to clear all available gold medals at the recently concluded 17th National Sports Festival (NSF) held in Port Harcourt, Rivers state, but alas, the reverse was the case.

Bayelsa State-born Canadian 2000 Olympic gold medalist, Dr Daniel Igali agreed with this fact, saying that given to the kind of environment the Ijaws inhabit, they are supposed to do well in both sports.

He said the reason behind their poor performance in swimming and wrestling was the pollution of all the waters in the state by crude oil spillage in the case of swimming while their wrestlers are scattered across the nation and winning laurels for other st ates.

Daniel Igali

Dr Igali who’s now the Technical Adviser of the Nigeria Amateur Wrestling Federation revealed to  Saturday Vanguard Sports during the Garden City Games in Port Harcourt that wrestling was like a religion in Ijaw land and that one can hardly find an Ijaw boy who does not know how to wrestle.

“When we have a dignitary in Bayelsa, we don’t entertain such a dignitary with  swimming, we entertain him with wrestling and that tells you the reverence attached to wrestling. It’s a cultural thing. There    is no boy who grows up in Bayelsa that will say he does not know how to wrestle. You do it in school, at your spare time and you do it every time.

Swimming is also there, but you know swimming requires a lot of techniques, it requires swimming pool and rivers are so polluted now that you hardly see people swimming  in Bayelsa. Oil has polluted Bayelsa so greatly that people now take to wrestling than swimming.

Wrestling is everybody’s game in Bayelsa”, he said

Continuing, he said, “the Ijaws are traditional wrestlers, that’s what we do as a people. When my grand father was marrying my grand mother, he didn’t have to pay any dowry because he was a good wrestler. That is the kind of  reverence given to good wrestlers in Ijaw land in Nigeria then.

Wrestling in the recent festival was fantastic, we had a record number of athletes attending this competition for the first time. I saw about a hundred athletes I have never seen before. The poor performance of the state in wrestling at the festival did not come to me as a surprise because, even before  the commencement of the festival, I knew that it was going to be an easy game for them as usual.

Most of the known faces have completed the participation  period in the festival and have been replaced by a crop of new wrestlers attending the games for the first time. While some who have not completed their number of participation in the festival are scattered across the nation competing for other states in this festival, but watch them out in Lagos 2012 when they must have matured fully in the sport”.