GenBuhari: Abacha was last leader to invest in sports which is why we won 2 gold medals and other medals in the 1996 Olympics

The decline started witn Obasanjo -he even refused to pay for an athlete who was killed in a motor accident during Sydney Olympics to be returned home.

STOP YOUR PROpaganda, that responsibility should fall with the ministry or the olympic team leader, some simple issues should not even get to the ministry

About N1.9 billion was said to have been released for the games, how was all that expended and what is left?

We got 2.2billion about two months to the Olympics. Remember when we had the public hearing at the National Assembly in April or so, we said we didn’t have the money yet to prepare for the Olympics. It is bad enough that you are receiving money for the Olympics only in the Olympics year and worse that you are getting the money only a few months before the games.

Then, if you convert this amount, it comes to only about 14million US Dollars. For the purpose of argument, if you spread it across the 81 athletes for both the Olympics and the Paralympics, then you have about 172, 000 USD per athlete! Yet, we expect these athletes to out-run and out-jump and out-lift athletes who have had the benefit of years of consistent high level funding. Do you know for example that Team GB spent about 10million Pounds on every single medal it won at the Olympics, where the total investment in preparing Team GB is 264million Pounds. Compare this to the 60million Pounds in Sydney. This again, emphasises that winning medals is about big money.

Now, talking about how we spent our money. The bulk of the funds went into preparing the athletes and attending qualifiers for some of the sports. In addition to the various local camps that we set up in different parts of the country, we had training camps in Germany for weightlifting, wrestling and table tennis. Our boxers were camped in Bradford University in the UK. The Taekwondo team was camped in South Korea. The basketball team was attending qualifiers in Venezuela. And as I speak, the Paralympic athletes are camped in South Korea. In addition to all these, we also opened a pre-games camp in Surrey where our athletes were camped before the Games Village opened to enable them acclamatise and continue with their trainings.

We did the best we could to ensure that the funds released were efficiently utilised. This is perhaps the first time that we would not have an official government delegation to a major international competition. This was to enable us prioritise the welfare of the athletes. And we have largely succeeded in doing this. That is why you did not hear that any athlete is complaining about any unpaid allowances. I have to check what is left. But we still have the Paralympics to prosecute.

However, more importantly the point needs to be made that in the context of what other countries are spending to prepare their athletes to win medals, we are nowhere near as you have seen. These things cost huge money.

When people hear 2billion, they say that is a lot of money. Yes, 2billion can do a lot in our country, it can build more classrooms and buy books for children and sink boreholes.

But if we want to compete with the rest of the world in sports and do well, we have to do so much better than we are doing in funding.

We are not talking of money released a few days to Olympics or Commonwealth Games, we are talking of years of sustained spending and preparation.

Great Britain spends 100million pounds to fund sports annually and this is guaranteed for five years. Meaning that no matter what happens to politics in Britain, that fund is protected. Policy stability is also key here. I am not saying we must spend that kind of money to win things, but we must spend responsively and responsibly.

http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/our-olympics-odyssey-by-bolaji-abdullahi/122360/

interesting

so it's time for he paralympics everyone is silent

it's either we are not very fair as a society when dealing with disabilities or

we are just to disappointed with the previous group that didnt win any medal

either way these are the real medal hopefuls!! chances are we will get a medal with these Olympians!!!!

Paralympics is on. Surprised not a single care in the world for them bar the guy above me.

ABI were's the love n support jeez

Finally......Was looking for the Paralympics thread.

The Opening Ceremony I must say has been top notch thus far.