Minister of Youth and Sports, Barrister Solomon Dalung has said that a recent report credited to him in the media that athletes didn’t need training to win medals, but a winning mentality was false and with an intent to create mischief.
The minister who is in Rio to support Team Nigeria athletes taking part in the ongoing 2016 Paralympics said he did not grant a one-on-one interview with the quoted medium and challenged the writers to quote him right.
“The last interview I granted was at the flag-off of the NCC Tennis league at the Abuja National Stadium. I was asked to compare the performance of Nigerian athletes at the just-concluded Olympics and the ongoing Paralympics and I said that the performance of Nigerian athletes at the Paralympic Games had established the fact that apart from the right training, there was also need for the determination to excel. I said that they all trained under the same conditions like the Olympic athletes.”
That, apart from not having adequate preparations, what then can we attribute to the performance of the Paralympic athletes who have done so well at the Games. That, if their argument was lack of good training, the Paralympic athletes went through the same. In fact they trained here in Nigeria and I asked what was the secret? This was what I said to the journalists who were at the stadium for the tennis event,” Dalung said.
He stated that “We need to go back and do a proper X-Ray of the two circumstances to be able to make the best of of a bad bargain because the poor preparation was created due to paucity of funds, but the Paralympic athletes are making Nigerians proud here in Rio”.
