Tokyo Olympics: Ogunkoya offers medal-winning tips to athletes

 Olalekan Okusan

AT the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, Falilat Ogunkoya became the first Nigerian woman to win an Olympic medal after settling for a bronze medal in the 400m, behind Marie-José Pérec of France and Cathy Freeman of Australia, in a personal best and African record of 49.10seconds, which is currently the twelfth fastest of all time.

That record still stands unbroken 24 years after and Ogunkoya believes with hardwork and good coaching, Nigerian athletes can broke the record in no distance future.

“I always want a Nigerian athletes to break my record. I believed the record can be broken if they are ready to work hard. Also an athlete needs an inclusive package to be able to run fast or do well however, some of them are lazy because of the kind of coaches that are coaching them. We have to monitor the athletes and have a training camp for them with good coaches and when they start to return in good time in their various events and good distance in their field events, they will believe in their coaches and think less about taken banned substance,” she said.

She however, said that there must be conscious and immediate efforts by those in charge of sports to give schools sport the attention. “To get back our sports to the good old days, we need to return to school sports which mean we must go back to the base. Also we need to stop all these individuals that called themselves coaches when they not,” she said.

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She added: “We have some coaches that are ready to help the athletes but they are not given the chance.

But there must be categories of coaches to like having grassroots, junior and elites coaches unfortunately, everyone wants be an elite coach.”

For the athletes, she said: “Some of the athletes of these generations need to be ready to work hard and not to be telling their coaches that the work load is too much. And the government needs to be ready to support them financially because during my own days, we were paid from categories ABC. But nowadays everyone is getting the same little amount. Grant should be different from competition amount.”

For Nigeria to medal at Tokyo Olympics, she said: ” The only thing is athletes don’t have a lots of compliments to take part in the National Sports Festival and the festival can only achieved their aims if we all the states in the federation can take care of their athletes before and after the competition.

“We can win a medal at Tokyo if the government is ready to support the athletes and let the coaches that are ready to work come on board and the athletes really need to be monitored,” she explained.