What Nigeria Taekwondo Needs to Do in 2020 - Chukwumerije

What Nigeria Taekwondo Needs to Do in 2020

By Chika Chukwumerije OLY

2020 is an important sporting year with the Olympics undoubtedly the most important event of the decade’s debut. For the African Taekwondo community, the three most important events will be the African Qualification Tournament for Tokyo 2020 Olympics holding 23 – 24 February 2019 in Rabat Morocco and the Olympics itself in August.

For the Olympic Qualification Tournament, only the finalists in each of the eight Olympic categories will clinch the golden tickets to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and Nigeria Taekwondo will certainly target qualifying its top athletes for the Tokyo showdown after narrowly missing out on the Rio 2016 Olympics.

At the junior level, the World Taekwondo Junior Championships will be holding in Sofia, Bulgaria. With the 2022 Youth Olympics zoned to the African continent and the Senegalese nation, major African taekwondo nations will do well to use the youth event in Bulgaria to expose its youth athletes to the highest competitive level.

After the Qualification tournament for Tokyo 2020 is done and dusted, qualified athletes should be exposed to high-level international competitions across various continents, so tournaments like the Belgium Open, Egypt Open, Korea Open, Dutch Open, Spanish Open and USA Open could preview potential Tokyo 2020 matchups which would provide key technical info for all the teams involved.

Participation in various international ranked events will also provide an opportunity for lower ranked athletes to improve their Olympic ranking, which could be beneficial to their eventual draws in Tokyo, given that 100% seeding will be deployed for the fight draws.

Nigeria should strive again to get the Nigeria International Open sanctioned by the World Taekwondo, but ensure to host the event after the Olympics to avoid distractions.

At the national level, the Federation should encourage a lot of states and corporate organizations to float competitive events. This is to enable athlete to compete more in order to earn more national ranking points, which has been a huge success since its debut in 2017.

Sponsors should also be encourage to included prize monies for medalists as this is one of the most consistent request from athletes over the years.

With the successful debut of the season-ending Best of the Best Taekwondo Championships, athletes will look forward to point-earning events in order to make the 2020 edition of the prestigious, and potentially lucrative, event.

Despite the major focus on the Olympics in 2020, grassroots development initiatives should be robust and widespread especially in the coaching and refereeing areas.

The NTF Club Membership Initiative should be properly executed to bring exposure to clubs around Nigeria and connect members of the public to duly affiliated clubs. This would boost the economic profile of affiliated clubs while providing a vital service to enrolled persons, in this period of increased security awareness.

Efforts should also be made to increase membership on the World Taekwondo Global Membership System for Nigeria. The system will aid event registration for the many competitive events planned and its club admin features will ease administration challenges for affiliated clubs.

Urgent support in the immediate form of programs and workshops should be planned and given to Para-Taekwondo and Poomsae, two often neglected areas of Taekwondo in Nigeria.

Most importantly, the Federation needs to replicate and deploy its operational and administrative success to the area of marketing, branding and revenue-generation. In the absence of funding and other resources, its plethora of ideas will not become reality.

One way out of this is to highlight the business and investment opportunities that partnering with the Federation will throw up and efforts should made to get it across to the right desks, ears and pockets.

The Federation should also study and explore more ways to plugin to key programs and policies of the Federal Ministry of Youths and Sports and the Nigeria Olympic Committee that can deliver more benefits to the sport.

It should also deepen its relationship with the South Korean Embassy in Nigeria and the Korean Cultural Centre Nigeria. It should upgrade from the three-decade long practice of organizing just one tournament a year - the Korean Ambassador Cup – to more concrete initiatives like building a world class training center and having taekwondo educational coach and athlete exchange programs.

Lastly, while it is important for the Federation’s athletes to win international medals and carry out programs both on the national and international level, it should seek to implement policies that positively affects the economic situation of its many practitioners across the nation.