As curtains drop on the 2nd Niger Delta Games, chairman of the multiple sports competition’s screening committee, Sir Braveman Wodi has revealed the strategy that helped them prevent age cheats from appearing in all the events.
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Sports247 reports that, while pointing out that the regional festival was meant to be a talent hunt venture, Wodi said the first step was to check would-be participants before the Games began.
He thanked consultants of the Games and members of the organising committee for helping in that regard, as they introduced enlightenment campaigns and pre-tournament screening with visits to all the nine participating states.
“We started by lowering the age bracket, because the central idea is to churn out young talents. So, we did that. We also knew there would be a lot of issues with age cheats. That’s the pain of Nigerian sports. What do we do?
“So, we went hunting for those who are men and women of integrity. We also brought out rules that would be applied by all. That is exactly what was done,” Wodi disclosed.
The vastly experienced sports buff went on to reveal how accepting suggestions from experts equally aided the organisers to put in place proper checks on the ages of all competing athletes, even before they arrived at the Games’ venue in Benin City from their various states.
“To make sure of our success, the Project Consultant suggested that we should go for an advocacy tour to all the participating states and then carry out a kind of pre-tournament screening.
“That was exactly what we did, even before they came here. After we had their entries, even before the DMR, we had to screen all the athletes and found out that about 260 were ineligible.
“We forwarded that to the states, and we gave them room to replace those athletes. In doing so, the battle line had been drawn; because we had given them the platform to make the necessary amendments.
“What we did there was to weed out what we thought was not right in terms of age cheating, poaching of athletes and breach of the rules,” he expatiated.
Wodi, who is also a former director of sports in Bayelsa State, concluded by pointing out that their ability to check ages of athletes helped to improve competitive balance during the Games and they got authentic potentials in the talents discovered.
“I think the level of competition was keen and, to a very large extent, the athletes were very young. We had done a lot to that effect. The competition was keen, because the competitors were within the same age bracket,” Wodi affirmed.
