Nigerian Olympic champion, Chioma Ajunwa, has blamed the decline in Nigeria’s dominance in athletics to the way the country abandon her athletes after every tournament.
“The problem is huge,” Ajunwa, an Assistant Commissioner of Police, said, stressing that athletes are often abandoned at tournaments and this is drastically making the sport less promising for young and interested Nigerians to join.
“Here in Nigeria, we have not imbibed the culture of taking care of our athletes, as such, the younger athletes are not ready to give there all.
“They never talked about rewarding us for jobs, thank God I have something doing I would have been roaming the street, you see, that is the challenge and the problem of harnessing talent.
“If some of us have something doing we would have imparted the upcoming ones with it but the country prefers giving this same jobs to foreigners who do not know how we started” Ajunwa said.
Ajunwa, a gold medal winner in Long Jump at the Atlanta 96 Olympics, said athletes who eventually switch to other countries to compete for them should not be blamed.
Samson Oyedeyi with Agency Reports
