Nigeria should help Okagbare win Olympic gold – Alli

Yussuf Alli won gold in long jump at the 1990 Commonwealth Games, and holds the national record in the sport. In this interview with ALLWELL OKPI, the retired athlete speaks about Nigerian athletics and   Commonwealth Games record holder Blessing Okagbare

The All Africa Games will hold this year and the Olympics next year. Is Nigeria prepared for these competitions?

It’s very sad that when you talk about sports in this country people talk about football, whereas we have a minimum of 33 Olympic sports in this country. Last year was Commonwealth Games. The country won three gold and three silver medals in athletics. That will give you a clear picture of where we are. And this year being World Athletics Championship (in Beijing, China) and All Africa Games (in Brazzaville, Congo). We are working towards sending a strong team to the All Africa Games, which government wants us to dominate. In the last All Africa Games (in Maputo, Mozambique) we won 10 gold. This time around, based on our programmes, we are likely to win up to 15 gold. If government looks inwards and tries to support other sports other than football, Nigeria will be more recognised globally.

Look at the last Olympics, our basketball team was in there, but the football team was not there. I think we need to look at areas like taekwondo and karate. We have good athletes in those sports. In times past, if there were seven gold medals in table tennis (in a continental competition) we would win all seven. Now we are losing our grips, all we are talking about is football.

Have we started preparing for Rio 2016 Olympics?

As a country, I’ve not seen the any signs. But as individual athletes or federation, we’ve started. Our athletes are ranked in the world and know what to do. They also do this to make their own money. It’s their job. You don’t need to tell them to prepare. It is like telling a boxer to go and train. If he doesn’t train, he will be beaten. For example, you don’t need to tell Blessing Okagbare what to do. But government needs to come in. For example, for Okagbare, who has about four or five races before the Olympics, government can say, ‘this is money, instead of running five and burn out, run two, and conserve your energy so that you will have some juice going into the Olympics.’ That is what Jamaicans do. Jamaica can win six gold at the Olympics from two athletes. Usain Bolt will win three and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce will win three. That is how other nations plan and prepare to win gold at the Olympics. So, if we have an athlete like Okagbare, who can win Olympic gold, why can’t the country come out and say, ‘this is money on the table’ and get her to concentrate, train, and win gold for us?

Great Nigerian athletes went through developmental process from school sports. Is that process still working?

Way back in the 1990s, there was a youth programme. A lot of young athletes were discovered.   In 2002 or there about, we went to sleep. We stopped promoting age-grade competitions. We wanted to win every junior competition, thereby using overage athletes. But the Athletics Federation of Nigeria has gone back to real age-grade competitions, we will now see the gradual process again. An athlete running 10.6 seconds this year, by next year, he is running 10.2 seconds, maybe after another year, he will be running 9.8 seconds. He will achieve all that while he is still young. Sport is for the youth. If you are 25 and you are running Under-17, by the time you are 28, you are done and people will think you are just 20. Now that we have addressed that and we are using athletes with their true age. I think we are on course. People like Mary Onyali and Falilat Ogunkoya stayed so long because they started very young. Look at Blessing Okagbare, she was at the 2007 Africa Games (in Algiers), and today she is still here and she is still young, whereas those that claimed to be younger than her stopped running a long time ago.

Apart from age fraud, aren’t there other things that have changed between then and now?

A lot has changed. Then, most schools had games masters, who will take you on weekends or maybe after school, but now many schools in the country don’t even have playgrounds. These days, you have schools that are just two buildings, and that is destroying sports. There is no priority on giving the child the right to play. In those days, if you didn’t play football, you played hockey, basketball, table tennis or cricket. Today, how many schools have fields? How many schools employ games masters? The nation needs to take it as a priority to properly develop sport and make it an industry.

I started competing in 1978. We had these grades: junior, intermediate and senior. It is very simple, when you are in school, from class five down, you are in the junior category. Then the people in A-levels were put in the intermediate or senior grade depending on age and also height. My first Olympics was in 1980 (in Moscow) and I competed up to 1993. I competed for 15 years   because I was truly young when I started. The last time I jumped, my distance was 8.21metres. It’s sad that the record has remained I was barely 30 when I set the record. Now 30-year-olds are trying to run with Under-20. I started with people like Innocent Egbunike from school. We met during inter-house sports in 1978, 1979, 1980. That was how we grew up. We participated in four Olympic Games.

What are Nigeria’s chances at the World Athletics Championships?

Our chances of winning medals at the World Championship in China will be the women’s sprint – the 4x100m women, the 4x400m women and possibly, in the long jump. For the World Championships, I can’t talk about gold medals, I talk about medals. I believe we can win up to four medals.

 What about the men?

I

f I say our chances are good at the World Championships, I will be lying. Let’s see how the year goes. By June, we should be able to know where our men are. Right now they are not at par with the women.

Apart from Okagbare, do we have other athletes we can bank on for medals?

I can’t really say but I know that the women 4x4oom relay team is strong. But I want us to go past depending on relay. Let us prepare and go for individual medals in the sprints, high jump and long jump. These days we don’t even get to the final of long jump at the Olympics. I got to the final at the Olympics, but I’ve discovered that the distances I jumped then, current athletes cannot jump them. It’s sad. My national record still stands, it is painful. I jumped in the analog time. There was no GSM then. Now that technology has improved, let’s do something. It’s sad. When you ask them to bring money let’s train these athletes, they will say no. But if you are an American and you can speak good English, they will give you the job. If you are not an American, they will not give you the job.

You mean the preference for foreign coaches is also a problem for our athletics?

Yes, it is happening. Quote me anywhere. They employ foreigners that cannot match my CV, and they are here being paid, while there are a lot of ex-internationals that do not have jobs. I’m the only Nigerian coach that has coached a Nigerian athlete to jump eight metres. I did it to prove a point. I took a girl, Ese Brume, to the Commonwealth Games and she won gold. We must look inwards.