By Solomon Nwoke
Chairman of the Technical Commission of the Nigeria Olympic (NOC), Honourable Daniel Igali has predicted a bright outing for Team Nigeria athletes in the forthcoming All Africa Games in Congo Brazaville in September. He predicted that the Nigeria will win nothing less than 62 medals at the continental Games. In this concluding  part of the interview first published last Wednesday, Honourable Igali, who is also the President of the Nigeria Wrestling Federation agrees, “it’s very ambitious”. Excerpts.

When  the All Africa Games ends people will ask how many medals did wrestling win? Can you readily say this man will win gold, silver or bronze because that’s what the Nigerian society wants hear. Have you put all of this  together?

I have obviously. It’s something that I worked my head around. Everyday I look at the teams in Africa and I look at the different weight classes and I try to make some assumptions on who can and who can’t win based on the best scenario. I think at the Africa Games especially, if we start preparing from the end of June and if we have camp set for two months, we should be fine.

Team Nigeria

But that is not to say that that is an ideal situation because we haven’t had the tournament that we need. For me, it’s even more than the tournaments, these athletes should compete for about six times in a year at the minimum. If we are not competing, then we are in trouble. If we are able to camp in a closed camp set up we have two training partners at the most.

These training partners know exactly what you do and   you know exactly what they do, the most you can benefit from your camp situation is your fitness. So you are going to have a better fitness. But what about the technique and that is the issue, so you going to a competition exposes what is lacking in an athlete and he can come back and work on it. But if you are in a camp situation with one partner, you can train for one whole year   with one camp partner and you will essentially be the way you are except that you will be shaded than the other athletes.

Wouldn’t a foreign tour actually address that problem which you are against now?

A foreign training tour would expose you to one or two training partners. We have gone to a lot of foreign tours. If you go to a foreign tour, you normally train with a club, but sometimes with the national team and that national team has essentially one partner that trains with you. In competitions you will be exposed to three to six partners in one competition.

But sometimes when we go to competitions what I do is to arrange dual meet with other teams. So before or after the tournament sometimes an athlete gets knocked out in the first round and only has one match. What I do is to arrange for him to have two or three matches before the next bout. So the training tour will only expose you to different training methods, but does not necessarily address the issue of technique and partners and that’s why I harp more on competitions. We may not be able to go on a training tour, but they will encourage teams to go on competitions before the Games.

So if you say you are not for the training tour, what will be your own argument for it?

I am not saying that I am not for the training tour, but the position of NSC is that because of the time that we have and the available funds, we may not be able to go on a training tour. For me, we are looking at a competition in Romania which is between 12th – 17th of July. And I would Ideally like a National championship in July to select my team.

If I do that, we should be fine and additionally because of our deficiency in Greco Roman, I am working on a Greco Roman coach that we intend to hire for the period of the Games. So it’s about three months and while looking at that, I am also looking at the free style coach and I intend to discuss that with the Director General ( DG), so that we can have these two people come before the first week of July so that we can address those leakages before the end of September. If we get the result or I get the kind of turn around we can get from these two professors we can retain them till the Olympics.

You once said to be an expert in the Greco Roman it takes up to a year so are we going to convert your free style wrestlers to Greco Roman or you already have people you want to work on?

We have Greco Roman wrestlers, but the only problem there now is that they don’t have the level of coaching they deserve. When we had the Bulgarian coach, Attanasov in 1996 we had two African champions. In 1999 we had an African champion at the Games. They stayed with us for about five to six years. We went to these Games and I have seen the tape because I was not there to watch the Greco Roman wrestling bouts. There are about two athletes that can do very well if they have a good coach. We had three bronze medals from Greco Roman at the African championships, so if without much   training, we were able to do that, with a good coach in two and half months leading up to the Games and they are able to go to Romania with the three of them, they will surprise all.

As an Olympic gold medallist for Canada, have you been able to bring the template of that success over here.

The template is there, but it’s not about the template. It’s all about the funding. You can have whatever ideas that you want to have, but if you don’t have the level of funding, I tell you there is no short cut to success. It’s competitions, I used to have up to 70 matches a year, you compete, have the best coaches, you have the science backing you.

If you have these things in place which means you are able to recover quickly if you’re injured,   and you have coach who understands your style, you have people who can watch opponents draw a game plan before your match, someone scouting and telling what your opponents does and so on. That is just it, but funding goes into it. I just told you that we went to an African championships and it cost us almost N30million to go one championship, that is what is involved. If you can compete about six times and you have the coaches and you have the science backing you, then you can excel. There’s no other secret or template behind it . The template is you train, you compete, if you have injury and it heals quickly, that is just it.

One of your female wrestlers was injured while competing at the African championship, how is she now? Will she be fit to compete at the All Africa Games?

Yes we have been checking on her, she hasn’t resumed training, she is Biola in the 48kg weight class   from Ondo state. She has a knee injury and was in training, but I understand that she will start training by the beginning of next month.

She is recuperating, so I think she will be fine. In terms of our athletes getting injury, I think I commend the NSC because I remember in 2007 before the All African Games we had an athlete who had a neck injury and had to be rushed to Germany for treatment. At the Commonwealth Games in India, we had another athletes who had a neck injury and subsequently had a surgery also Amas had her tooth replaced and after the Commonwealth Games, another athlete, Onyebuchi Blessing who had a knee injury was taken to Dubai for surgery.

So   we’ve been doing what we can to rehabilitate our athletes.   Though, sometimes, the speed at which we do it is not enough and I will quarrel with that , but the NSC has always come to our aid and I am grateful for that.

What is your federation doing to secure fund at your federation level?

The federation can only go to sponsors to source for funding, to corporate bodies for funding. The material that you have are your athletes, the branding is the federation and sponsors haven’t bought into the idea that you need to support athletes and it’s not just the athletes, by doing that, you’ doing your social responsibility and you are also promoting your country there’s nothing you can do. I, as an individual have met with over 20 corporations .

And what did they say?

Most times they tell you that their budget for the year has been exhausted   that you should come next year and next year you put in   and nothing comes out of it. For instance, we wanted to host the African Championships and we met with 40 corporations, the only person that we even got a promise of products to be given to us was Coca cola. They were going to give us some of their products for the championships. So it’s something we need to work on.

Could it be a problem of acceptance?

If it was a problem of acceptance I will say okay this is something that is peculiar to wrestling, but it’s not.

But football manages to get sponsors?

Football manages to get sponsors, but if you would look at the level that football gets sponsorship in other countries, it’s still lacking in Nigeria. Football virtually got low, I see Tom Tom sometimes, but what are we really getting. Football still rely essentially on government, so football is still not getting sponsorship as far as I am concerned.

I have been opportuned to be in a country where you are going to the Olympics next year if you are having an agreement with any of the sponsors this year, you are not talking this Olympics, you are talking about three Olympics at a stretch. You are looking at the clothing sponsor who would kit the whole team, give you millions of dollars and they will be fighting over each other to keep the team. We are not just about the clothing sponsors, a sporting drink sponsors the team separate, telecom sponsorship is separate. Everything is separate. And you look at an Olympic Committee that has about four sponsors, so they don’t have to go to government for anything. We need to have the people here to understand that concept and it will take time for them to understand.

Do we have a kit   sponsor for table tennis team?

We had Nike initially, but we haven’t been able to get the kind of deal that I want, so we had Nike who gave us kits like boots and singlets, but I am looking at the situation   where (and that was with the US Nike not even Africa because of my relationship there ) we have sponsorship   for a number of years where we’ll know what our responsibilities are. This one was more of a goodwill gesture because they know me and they feel I am in charge of the team so we’ll help and support you. But it takes time to be able   to craft these things together, you need to be able get it down on paper. I don’t know of any African team that has a sponsor in wrestling any shoe or corporate sponsor not even in North Africa. So it hasn’t come to that point, but I am hoping that it does because it’s the only way I know that we’ll have a kind of relief from this constant problem of inadequate funding from government .

With all these problems what will be your prediction ahead of the All Africa Games?

We are going to be between fourth and first.

Overall or wrestling?

My target for wrestling is to win six gold medals, it’s going to be a tough task to do, but that would be my target and the athletes are aware of that.

But the last time you went with 18 wrestlers?

Yes, we took 18, but eventually 16 competed. I will need more than that to go to the Africa Games. If I have my way   I will go with 24 wrestlers because it’s eight per class; freestyle, Greco Roman and women wrestling. But the Olympic classes are only six, but the NSC wanted only the Olympic classes to go because if you don’t go this, you can’t go to the World Championships for the qualifiers because this Is the precondition now because they wanted only the Olympic classes to go. I would ideally go with everybody, but I also share the view that if somebody doesn’t measure up he shouldn’t   go. But I don’t think I will go with less than 20.

When asked about your prediction of our position at the Games, you were like talking generally for the whole Team Nigeria, but you are not putting in perspective what other sports will be coming up with. Like athletics, boxing, weightlifting and so on. The technical commission will be doing a lot of work when it comes to concluding on which team goes and how many athletes go in a particular sport?

Yes, I was talking about the Nigerian team. We are already working on that and we know what the individual federations have been doing. We have the projections. We think we can win about 62 medals. That is the projection.

It very ambitious!

Yes it’s very ambitious, but that’s what we are trying to work towards and we are trying to see how the sports will come up with that.