The National Sports Commission (NSC) yesterday warned the country’s representatives at the upcoming All Africa Games (AAG) against unwholesome practices especially doping.
The Director General of the Commission, Alhassan Yakmut said that the NSC had set up machineries in place to monitor what the nations athletes take in before the games scheduled to hold in Congo Brazzaville from September 4th to 19th, 2015. Yakmut also said Nigeria will not allow any lazy athlete to rubbish her image at the international stage, saying that if she is to win, She would win clean.
“We all recall with serious pains in our hearts when medals are taken back even though we too, as a nation, in the 400m in 2000 benefited from the retrieval of medals. But again, you can’t repair the image that is battered.
“We have created a full advocacy platform for anti-doping and 65 samples have gone [for test], another 65 will go and no segment of the athletes would be left out. We have given the instruction to the Doping unit to ensure that the results are out before the Games start,” he noted.
Yakmut said that the NSC is determined to not let any fraudster harm the image of the nation during the games. He then revealed Team Nigeria’s cliché: “We are only going to play clean and win clean”, adding that any athlete who goes against this and gets caught will be made to face the full hammer of the law.
He then said: “Now that we have said your welfare will be taken care of, why would you then want to cheat to win?”
Recall that Nigeria got disgraced at last year’s commonwealth games when then 16-year-old weight lifter, Chika Amalaha failed a preliminary drug test at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland after winning the gold medal. The Rivers State-born athlete was then subsequently banned from the participating in any weight lifting tourney for the next two years; her ban expires July 25, 2016.