01 Jul 2024

Athletics continues to raise the national flag high by asserting itself as a force to reckon with globally, Botswana National Olympic Committee (BNOC) president, Colonel Botsang Tshenyego has said.

Tshenyego said this at the organisation’s ordinary general meeting recently, indicating that so far, athletics was the only sporting code that had managed to qualify athletes for the Olympic Games to be held in Paris, France from July 26 to August 11.

Thus, he encouraged other national associations to use the Botswana Athletics Association (BAA)’s development blueprint.

“Despite failure to send athletes, efforts by other sporting codes are also noted. Another time, another chance surely awaits,” he said.

He also said the collapse of schools sport had undoubtedly contributed to the low performance by many sporting codes.

“It is surely a big struggle to ignore the compound effect of the collapse of schools sport, which poses more threat towards the Youth Olympics Games (YOG) 2026 in Dakar, Senegal, unless there is a drastic change,” he said.

He also bemoaned the effects of delayed funding, which he said was all the more evident.

Again, he said apart from late funding, lack of deliberate development pathways to feed the appetite for medals continued to be another biggest downfall to national sport.

He said medals could not be realistically attainable without a holistic and deliberate process and therefore tantamount to self-sabotage to continue immense obsession with medals without proper long term plans in place to achieve that.

“There is an urgent need to invest in development and federations that capitalised on the opportunity of schools sport collapse and established club systems as another option for grassroots development are likely to benefit in the emerging club support policy,” he said.

He advised that in the absence of schools sport, clubs were a more sustainable way going forward.

He further decried the decline in female participation at base and all levels, adding BNOC would however grasp every opportunity to advance women in sport from the boardroom to the field.

He added that urgent strategising on what could be done individually and collectively to change the current state of affairs was therefore needed.

On more positive news, he indicated that BNOC had enjoyed generous positives this year, which included the presence of a technical sponsor for the games for the very first time.

He also hailed the appointment of the Gaborone city clerk to the BNSC board, saying that would help influence new or improved infrastructure to benefit sport.

For her part, BNOC caretaker chief executive officer, Tebogo Kesupile reiterated the need for the organisation to do more to ensure that more women athletes qualified for major events such as the Olympics as their participation had been low.

Kesupile said for the coming Olympics, they had a target of seven female athletes, but so far no female athlete had qualified.

“To achieve this, I would urge codes to invest more in young talent and this will help in the overall performance of our athletes and not just in women participation,” she said. ENDS