London 2012: NSC working towards hauling Olympic medals

By Ime Bassey

Director of Sport Federations at the National Sports Commission, NSC Alhaji Alhassan Yakmut has  affirmed that the NSC is keen ensuring that all the tickets gotten by Team Nigeria at the qualifiers turn to medals at the Olympics proper.

The one time captain of the National Volleyball team told Sunday Vanguard Sports that the commission is satisfied with the amount of tickets won by the various federations from their qualifiers.

“We are planning to have a qualitative participation at the Olympics in order not to waste tax payers’ money, so we intend to convert each ticket won to a medal. We started preparing for the Olympics since last year, few months before the All Africa Games in Maputo, but the issue of late disbursement of funds from the federal government made us to adjust our plans early this year.

“The tickets for the Games have increased as the various federations are about completing their qualifiers. Our projections for them shows that the standard deviation is not much,” Yakmut said.

He recalls that “for wrestling, we planned for three male and two female tickets but we were able to get two each. In Taekwondo, we looked at three male and one female, but we got two male, while in canoeing, we were sure of it and we got it.

We have sixteen tickets in power lifting and more are still coming from those that their qualifiers are ongoing,” he stressed, adding, “after all the qualifiers have been concluded, we will move into camp in Nigeria, Korea and Germany for about 30 days before moving into the Games village in London.”