13 Mar 2024

Team Botswana chef de mission, Shadrack Kapeko is confident that the country will attain the set target of 10 medals from the ongoing African games in Accra, Ghana.

So far, Botswana has won four bronze medals, two from karate in the women’s kata team and Lethabo Sekano and the other two from Andrian Robinson in both 50m and 100m breaststroke.

In an interview, Kapeko said out of the 11 codes, only chess was the only without a medal while the pair of Jestinah Moyo and Ngirl Wright in the women’s beach volleyball were also out of the competition after losing 2-0 to Sierra Leone on Tuesday. They lost both sets 21-14 and 21-16.

Nonetheless, Kapeko said they were expecting the medal count to rise since the competition was ongoing.

He added that while other codes had already competed, boxing, basketball, taekwondo, weightlifting and athletics were yet to start their competitions, hence confident that they would meet or exceed the set target.

“The whole idea is to surpass our last performance and I am still confident that our athletes will do their best,” he said.

He said the African games, formerly known as All Africa Games, were also used as preparations for some codes for the France 2024 Olympic Games.

He added that they also used the African games to give other non-Olympic sport codes the opportunity to prepare for other major competitions.

“Although our aim is to win medals, the main goal is also to give our athletes from different codes exposure,” he said.

Meanwhile, in the last African games in Morocco, Botswana won five gold, three silver and six bronze medals and finished 13th on the medal table.  ENDS