Nigeria’s sports minister, Sunday Akinlabi Dare has expressed satisfaction with the decision by International Olympic Committee (IOC) to postpone this year’s Games billed for Topkyo, Japan will provide a wider window of opportunity for Nigeria’s athletes in the qualifiers, megasportsarena.com reports.
With the 2020 Olympics now shifted until July 2021, the IOC has also deemed it fit to extend the schedule of qualifying competitions beyond this year, much to Dare’s delight, and the minister admitted that Nigerian athletes will benefit immensely from the development.
The sports minister, who in November received in Abuja the IOC president, Thomas Bach and the boss of African National Olympic Committees Association (ANOCA), Bartman Barif, added that an end has come to a cloud of uncertainty that initially gathered over the Tokyo 2020 qualifiers involving Nigerian athletes and others around the world.
He admitted that postponement of the Olympics by a year, as a result of the spread of COVID-19 across the world, had cast a shadow of doubt over most of the qualifiers that were yet to be completed, hence his commendation to the ICO for clearing the air on the contentious issue.
Dare noted that respite has now come for Nigerian athletes and their counterparts from other countries that were yet to complete their qualifiers for Tokyo 2020, as the IOC announced new dates for the elimination competitions in a letter to all member nations.
He disclosed that all uncompleted qualifiers have now been extended till the end of June 2021, which is a week’s grace before the final deadline of July 5th, and 18 days before the Olympics gets underway on July 23rd, 2021.
Fifty seven percent of the 11,000 athletes that would be participating at the Tokyo Olympics had qualified before the event was moved by a year due to the pandemic, but the IOC said it would finalize the adapted qualification system later in the month.
The ICO submitted: “We understand at these times that these are unlikely to include full details of the dates and locations of the specified events. We recognise that this would follow later as the impacts of the COVID-19 and its related restrictions become clearer.”
Dare, who also assured that Nigeria will stick to the earlier stance to feature athletes in only 11 events at the games in order to enhance her chances of performing well, responded thus: “We are excited that the IOC has granted this concession so that those qualifiers can be completed. This will give the athletes ample time to prepare.
“Also, we now have enough time to make funds available to those sports federations that had yet to complete their qualifiers. We are monitoring all our athletes and we believe they are training well despite the worldwide lockdown.”