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By Joe Apu
The Nigeria Wrestling Federation returned from the African Games in Accra, Ghana full of satisfaction it the performance of her athletes. Team Nigeria recorded a clean sweep of gold medals at the ongoing African Games after the six female wrestlers representing the country all won in their various categories. Mercy Genesis kick-started the gold medals rush; winning Nigeria’s first wrestling gold medal in the 50kg category.
The gold rush continued as Christiana Ogunsanya cruised to victory in the women’s 53kg wrestling event. The dominant wrestler defeated her Ivorian counterpart, Celine Josee Bakayoko, by technical superiority (11-0) to win Nigeria’s second gold medal in the women’s wrestling event.
Three-time Commonwealth champion Odunayo Adekuoroye extended Nigeria’s dominance by making it three gold medals with her triumph in the final of the women’s 57kg category. She defeated Morocco’s Zainab Hassoune by pinfall (6-0), and the 30-year-old, who was very emotional, dedicated the medal to her late mother.
A fourth gold medal in women’s wrestling was won for Nigeria by Esther Kolawole. The world U23 bronze medalist defeated her opponent in the 62kg category by technical superiority.
Shortly after, Olympic silver medalist Blessing Oborududu claimed the country’s fifth gold medal in wrestling and the sixth at the ongoing 13th African Games. Oborududu defeated Cameroon’s Blandine Nyeh Ngiri by technical superiority (14-4) in the women’s 68kg class.
African Champion Hannah Reuben crowned the country’s dominant performance on Sunday by defeating Ivory Coast’s Amy Youin 10-0 (technical superiority) in the 74kg category to win Nigeria’s sixth gold medal in women’s wrestling at the Games.
For the President of the NWF, Daniel Igali, the performance was nothing short of excellent and he hopes to replicate it in Paris 2024.
In this interview, he spoke of challenges he has faced running the sport, managing the athletes, his home and what hopes he envisions for the sport even as his term of office elapses in 2025.
Enjoy the interview.
Congratulations on Nigeria’s performance at the African Games, the next issue id the Paris 2024 Games, what is the update on the Olympic qualification process?
So far, we have qualified six of our athletes (1male and 5 females) through to the Olympics. Last year, at the World Championships, we were doing a decoration. We had qualified at the world level by virtue of winning a bronze medal at the World Championships. And for the record, that was the only medal, world-level medal that was won by any sport in Nigeria last year from wrestling.
But this year, at the Olympic qualifiers, the Oceania/Africa Olympic qualifiers that just ended, we were able to qualify. One male athlete Ashton Mutuwan in the 125kg. Unfortunately, Mercy Genesis, who in my view is a dark horse for a medal at the Olympics, miraculously didn’t qualify. She was leading with nine seconds to go but got ruled out
We protested but nothing came out of it. However, there’s one opportunity for her to go to Turkey, Istanbul, I think around the 5th and 6th of May for the last World Olympic Qualifying Tournament.
We’re hoping that she’ll be able to qualify there. So we can have about seven athletes going to the Olympics. If we’re able to qualify all six female athletes, we’ll be one of very few countries in the world that will be able to qualify all six. Maybe Japan and the United States, but I’m not even sure the United States will qualify all six. Right now, we are the only country in the world that has qualified five female athletes for the Olympics.
The team is six in the female category. We have qualified five already. If we’re able to get Mercy, that would be the whole team would have qualified, which is a very difficult thing to do because there’s only 16 female athletes in our power class that qualify for the Olympics. For me, we are very close to the goals we had set out for this quadrennial, which was to qualify between five and seven athletes for the Olympics.
We’re at six now, so if we’re able to get one more, we would have been almost at the top of the ladder of what we had initially planned to do.
You talked about meeting some of your goals. With your tenure elapsing in 2025, world you say you met all your targets?
My tenure as the President of the Nigeria Wrestling Federation comes to an end next year. So we’re in a very critical stage of looking at succession planning, because next year I would have been 12 years in the saddle as president. It’s been very tasking, but it’s also been a lot of fun because it’s something that I have a lot of passion for.
It’s something I wanted to do because I felt being the president would change things the way I wanted it to be. When I was a Technical Director, I had a president who sometimes did thing that was not the way I wanted done. The things you wanted didn’t pan out the way you had planned it. So this is what I wanted. But I don’t know if we were able to achieve everything we wanted to achieve. I had thoughts we would be able to get a world champion and an Olympic gold medalist. Those were my two biggest goals coming in.
We’ve had silver medalists at the world championships twice and a silver medal at the Olympics. But we’ve not been able to crack the gold medal.
Why is the gold medal that important?
The gold medal is completely separate from every other medal. Canada had never won a gold medal at the Olympics until mine in 2000. And in male wrestling from 2000 till date, not even one of them has even wrestled for bronze at the Olympics. That goes to tell you how stiff the competition is in the world. You know, the competition level of wrestling is completely different from what it was in the 90s and even early 2000s now.
Because in the 90s, the Soviet Union was just one country. Now there are the breakaway countries. The countries are well over 15, almost 20 from the Soviet Union. And they’re all good. So it has exposed our athletes to a lot stiffer competition. So the level of wrestling is a lot higher than it was a couple of decades ago. It has also made us to also step up. But aside that, I think, the level of funding has been the other major issue.
I definitely believe that in the likes of Blessing Ovorubidu, Oduanyadekoriye, even in the men, with somebody like Amas Daniel, because of the level of talent he had, and somebody like Sinivie Boltic, who actually wrestled for a bronze medal, was in the semifinals in 2011.
He’s the only freestyle athlete that has wrestled for a bronze medal at the World Championships. I think if we had more funding and had exposed them the way I would have ideally wanted, we would have been talking about at least one world champion. We may even have been talking about an Olympic gold medalist by now.
Any regrets about funding?
So if I have any regret; that is about the only regret I have. The funding expectations didn’t meet our ambitions. And in talking about that, I think we really need to also talk about the big elephant in the room, and that is funding of sports in Nigeria. It’s a big issue.
I recently had a meeting with the minister, and he wanted to know how we could win medals. And I was telling him, we cannot win medals, at the level we’re capable of, if this funding paradigm is sustained in Nigeria. And this is why I say that.
Even as our neighboring African states, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, there is none of them that has a budget less than a million dollars a year. I have been president of the Nigeria Wrestling Federation for almost 12 years by next year. And I have not received one naira for development of the Federation from the Sports Ministry.
How is that?
So what the Sports ministry does and what Nigeria does is fund competitions. So if you are going to the Africa Games, the Commonwealth Games or the Olympics, they will find a way to send the athletes to those competitions. But there is nothing the Federation does to prepare their coaches, to prepare their referees and coaches for development of the athletes. And when we’re talking development, we’re talking about having the athletes’ pathway for success. So, for instance, if the Wrestling Federation knows that as obtains in other climes that this year, wrestling has $500,000 for their development that is the money we will also use for our athletes going to competitions.
But we can sit down and now look at the cadet team. Okay, how many competitions will they go to? Who are the coaches that will coach these teams? Wrestling has six national teams, in three styles, Greco-Roman, freestyle, and female wrestling. And you have the cadet team, the junior team, and the senior team.
And if you really want to succeed, you must have your own team. Your cadet athletes, especially, in fact that is the key, your cadet athletes must go to the African Championships, they must go to the World Championships, your junior athletes must go to the African Championships they must go to the World Championships.
Those are the ones that you are looking at to take over from the senior athletes in two, three years. But I tell you, since I’ve been president of this Federation, our cadet athletes have only travelled twice. And one of those times was funded by the Bayelsa State Government. So, it was three Bayelsa athletes that we were able to take to the World Junior Championship. OdunayoAdekoroye in 2010 had that opportunity to go to the Cadet African Championships. But that’s about it. In 2009, 2010, 2011, India and Nigeria were almost neck to neck. But today, India and Nigeria can never be on the same page.
Why is Nigeria not on the same page with India anymore?
This is because; India had a level of consistency. Tata Motors started sponsoring them about five years ago. And from then till now, they consistently had budgets of between $3.5m to $5m yearly. As I’m talking to you, this year, the Indian cadet female team are the World champions and Team champions. That is, the whole team of cadets are going to the cadet world championships. I was there as a technical delegate.
There is no competition, be it junior competition or in the senior categories that India will not attend with a full teams in team wrestling, Greco Roman and freestyle. So the moment you have that sustained over three, four, five, six years, you will see that they start competing very well favourably with the rest of the world.
And that is what Nigeria is lacking. And it’s not just in wrestling. It is in every sport. So if we are going to get it right, we must have a budget that is apportioned to sporting federations as it happens in Australia, US, Canada, Germany and in every advanced country that wants to do well in sports.
Federations must have a budget. And that will allow them to plan. I laugh when they ask me such questions like what are your plans for the year. What plans can you have if you don’t have any finds? And you don’t have any idea of forms.
In that case, funding the federations is key to sports development?
You cannot plan without money. So if someone tells you, what are your plans for the year? What plan can you have? If you know that you have $100,000, you plan with it. If you have 1 million, then you plan with 1 million but there is nothing. So if you are going to the African Championships three months before, you have to write a letter to the Sports Ministry to let them know that you would like to go to the African Championships and then they are now going to look at it and maybe two, three days before you now hear okay they’ve approved this much for you meanwhile you have maybe 20 athletes in camp and what is approved can only take six of them.
So you tell the others to go back home. That is the problem we now have in Nigeria and if that is not corrected we are going to continually underperform. I’ve often told them to look at a country like Cuba that have no resources but there is no Olympics where Cuba will not return with less than three gold medals. That is what we should look at because Cuba takes physical and health education as a priority in their primary schools.
There is child, except you have a terminal illness or you are really sick or disabled, the moment you are in primary school you must belong to a sport. If you are not, they will not let you go to the Olympics.
They will do all the relevant tests on you and say it’s athletics you belong to, this one you belong to boxing, you belong to wrestling so at a primary/ secondary school level every athlete is doing a sport and from there they can now jump to the cadets, to the juniors and to the senior levels they also don’t have funds but because of the intentional attitude of the government with respect to the younger athletes they are able to sustain it and you see that as I’m talking to you now I’m looking at the Cuban coach to come in.
They have Cuban coaches all over the world now. You go to Tunisia you have a Cuban coach, they are everywhere in Africa we have almost eight Cuban coaches in different countries. If in our culture of sports, the government has been able to do same over time so I don’t see how a country like Nigeria can’t have coaches all over too.
Now, we’re going to the Olympics in four months; maybe we can say Tobi Amusan is the only person that we can look at competing for a gold medal but even at that if we’re going to look at our records from last year, remember she was fought at the world championships. The United States is going to be able to tell you how many gold medals they’ll be able to win and you can bet it will almost be with 95% accuracy based on results they have taken over two years and the results of these people at the world championships before the Olympics.
So when the minister was asking me how many gold medals Nigeria would be able to win at the Paris 2024 Games, I asked how many people won medals at the world championships last year.
In your opinion, what are Nigeria’s chances for gold?
We don’t have any except by sheer luck because you cannot just sit down and say you are going to win these medals if you have not demonstrated it over time. It’s not rocket science. I am worried about the funding mechanism of sports in the country and would probably be using this opportunity to beg President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to change the sports funding paradigm.
We must get that will power to get funds for sporting federations to be able to plan and if we start now, by the next Olympics might be where we’ll be able to get the results but in 2028 and 2032 we can beat our chest to say yes we’ve done the right thing and we’ll get the requisite results but if we leave sports the way it is, sports will continue to disintegrate. I know that we have a lot of sports loving Nigerians; in fact we’re all sports fans but we must put our money where our mouth is and this extends to private individuals that have that interest to fund sports and corporations because I also believe that corporations are not doing enough to support the government in terms of funding sports.
When we look at our economic climate and we look at our political terrain if you look at the kind of instability we have in the country with respect to security issues I think the only solace Nigeria has is in sports. That’s where national equation is achieved and so this government needs to make this a priority. It does not take much but sports is expensive.
We just went with a contingent of 20 to Alexandria for both the African Championships and the Olympic qualifiers for 11 days and it cost us N150 million. That is how expensive sports is so if we are going to talk about funding of sports we need to ensure that it’s going to cost some money but this is money that will get over and over in terms of what it will do to our national psyche.
How has being President of the NWF affected your family life?
Being President has not been about financial consideration but one needs to be careful at the home front. Your son is to attend a football summit and you say there’s no money because you have some athletes that must attend an international event. How do you explain that?
Aside family, the athletes are also a major concern. I recall when Odunayo Adekuoroye, lost to Anastasia Nichita of the Republic of Moldova on account of a fall at the Tokyo 2020 Games, I feared that she would commit suicide. Adekuoroye was leading 8-2 on the scorecard before Nichita achieved the win via VFA (Victory by fall).
I didn’t sleep for two straight nights because she was so heartbroken and we didn’t want her to be alone on her own. We had to take her out of the Games Village and brought to the hotel so we could watch her every move.
