 The preparation. How did Nigeria get it wrong? Ten athletes declared ineligible to compete. The basketball team jersey is also coming late, contingent appearing in discordant clothing. And our football teams miss it in action, plus the controversy over the deal with Puma. The wins and losses. Blessing Okagwari, failing doping tests. Divine Ododoro making a false start in 100 meters. A cause medal in the women's hurdle before it groans in long jump and silver in wrestling. And what about the future? How do we avoid the repeat of an unpleasant situation in the coming Olympic Games? Sit back as we take you through Nigeria's Tokyo 2020 experience. We'll say good morning and welcome. Thanks for joining us on a Friday morning on the breakfast here on Clause TV Africa. It's our Olympic special and our conversations today are going to be going all and around the Olympic Games on hand. How Nigeria has fared? I am Osaugi Ogba. And I am Annette Felix. Now we know that the Olympic Games will end in two days. And it's the moment Nigeria sits in its 71st position out of 81 countries. And the committee taking part. We have a silver and a bronze thanks to SA Brumaire and Blessing Oburudu. Brumaire won a bronze medal in long jump. Oburudu won silver in women's wrestling. Both athletes have been rewarded with $7,500 and $10,000 for their feats. Ok so we're back to the promises here but it seems that this time around they received their prize money. This is something we've talked about time and time again. About athletes doing well for the country and then receiving gifts that they never get. Remember the coach that took Nigeria to World Cup Olympics victory in 1996? He basically went on to complain about just how much he was promised. He was the former assistant technical advisor of the Super Egos said he was promised a medal. He was about to go upstage to receive the medal but he told him the medal wasn't ready so he never got that. He was promised a piece of land in Nigeria. He never got that. In an interview he granted to Nigerian media in 2020. He went on explaining all these things and that out of anger he didn't return to Nigeria. He simply went back to his own country. But it seems that the Nigerian government has learnt from their mistakes. They have both received $7,500 and $10,000 respectively for winning that bronze and silver. Congratulations to them once again. We're at least better than 10 teams that have gone to the Olympics. Not bad. There's still nine other teams somewhere behind us. Hopefully that doesn't change in the next two days. About their prize. Like you said, Nigeria has learnt from their mistakes in the past and has gone ahead to give them their cash gifts. Which I would of course commend them but there's so many other aspects with regards to the Olympic Games that obviously haven't learnt anything for them and that is mostly organization and preparation for these games. We finally got a bronze and a silver. Congratulations to us. It is expected and these are things that we should praise the Nigerian government for fulfilling its promise and giving cash gifts to the athletes. It is expected that you should do so. It's pretty much the same with praising a governor for fixing a streetlight. It is expected as part of the process. I'm not going to clap for them for going ahead and doing it. Maybe yes, we'll have this reaction because of past experiences of other athletes from the past. Of course, you just mentioned Bonfri Joe. We've also spoken here about how the Supergirls coach has complained about being old salary for months and all of that. So there is that but once again it makes me go back to what I was saying initially. That is a sad place that we are with our sports. We haven't gone to a place where the cash gifts from government aren't necessarily the only prize to win when you compete at the Olympics. We've not been able to get that level of brand sponsorship that makes athletes know that once they win gold or they win silver they will have very, very beautiful endorsements and they will have next couple of years signed to some brand or the other. Maybe a sporting brand may not be a sporting brand but that level of attention to sports and we're not there yet. I don't think Shikari Richardson or the US basketball team or any of the athletes in the US is going there to compete and hoping that the government would fulfill their $10,000 promise to each athlete who wins a medal at the Olympics. I'm sure maybe those things will happen but most importantly is the possibility of endorsements from very, very big brands across the United States or any other country. We've not gotten there yet and that's the part that I'm not very excited about. That's where we should be and that's where I hope that we will get to. Same thing with our football and the attention that we should place with local football here. The aim bars and the canopilas and all of them. There should be some level of attention that it gets to make these players not necessarily rely only on club salary but they have some level of endorsement that they will get because they won the Champions League or they won the Nigerian Professional League and all of that. We will have more extensive conversations this morning about preparations, how we have fared so far the Olympics, what we could have done different and in what ways can we improve moving to the next Olympics. This is maybe the first Olympics in a very, very long time that we didn't even get any of the football teams to play in which is really rare and unusual to be honest but this is where we are, we'll see how it goes from here. Moving on, a non-profit organization is using its verified Instagram handle to advise future Nigerian athletes to form the Niger Olympic Committee. This is to avoid relying on the Nigerian government and the kind of embarrassing situations suffered in Tokyo. One of the saddest moments for the country was when the 20 athletes were disqualified for failing to meet minimum test requirements and half of them were Nigerians. We remember one of the most shocking of them, it's blessing. So much hope in her about just how much she had prepared and how she was ready to bring home the crown for Nigeria and when we heard that Okabari had been suspended from Olympics, she had failed to meet up with the Athletics Integrity Unit, the test that were done. So basically that really put a spin on the whole thing and it made Nigerians very disappointed in that fact. And questions really that we want to ask regarding why these tests were not done, why didn't we discover they're still part of the preparation talks that we're having. We're supposed to have done those tests wearing me because imagine putting in all that effort, all that hard work, only to go there to be embarrassed so to speak, it really didn't seem pleasing. So first Okabari wasn't part of the 10 that were announced as disqualified for failing to do the out of competition tests. She was, I think was the drug test that was carried out during the games that she failed. Most of the people who responded to that said that from her career and from the times and the years that she put into athletics, she had a very clean career so this was maybe just an innocent mistake that she made, that she must have consumed during the games or prior to the games that must have led to this. So there is that and the 10 that were disqualified that eventually of course there was a protest somewhere in Tokyo, Nigerian athletes were protesting against the mismanagement basically of the whole Olympics games. You would obviously feel sorry for them. I saw an interview where Suleimand along the former Minstrel Sports was speaking and saying that they had put all the things on ground to ensure that there was proper testing before the games and with the constitution of the Olympics and with the laws and rules and regulations guarding the Olympics. But after he left, according to him after he left, some of all those things were discarded and there wasn't proper management of these processes before the Olympic games and that's why things played out like that. You cannot blame the athletes. You cannot speak about the organization, the Nigerian Olympics, the Nigerian Sports Ministry, the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. They are 100% to blame here because they of course are the ones who are meant to make sure that these rules are followed. If any athlete does not comply with the rules and regulations with regards to testing before the games, then they shouldn't have been sent there in the first place. But for the Athletics Federation and the Nigerian Sports Ministry to have sent these athletes there, it means that they have done their part or they assume that they have done their part with regards to testing before the games, the out of competition tests that should have carried out. But it didn't obviously and that's why these things turn out this way. It's really just a thing with management and proper organization and the fact that once again in Nigeria, which we've said multiple times, is that nobody really gets to answer for these failures and these lapses. We never really would get to see a place where somebody is going to take blame for the failure of the Nigerian Olympics team to compete among their peers, to actually go there and give a good show, to not go there and bring back these embarrassing stories where people are protesting in Tokyo. I don't remember any time that I've seen a group of Nigerian athletes protesting in the Olympic games or any sports. I remember one time that they couldn't book hotels, they couldn't book a flight, that there's a rumor that Miquel Obie had to pay for their flights and some of all of that. So it's really just a failure of management and the whole organization with regards to Nigeria sports and that's where we are today. Sunday Dari, for the longest time, even prior to the Olympics, has had a lot of questions that needed to be answered and is he going to be answering those questions? Are there going to be hard questions asked to the Minnesota sports with regards to what happened to the Nigerian Olympic team? Where do we go from here? In what ways did we fall short? And whose responsibility was it to ensure that these things were done? Simply proper management is where we missed out completely on and so definitely there should be questions asked. It's sad, really, really sad. Anyway, you already also know about Puma's termination of its deal with the Athletics Federation of Nigeria over an ongoing feud between the Sports Ministry and the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. You know, once again, another very embarrassing incident that occurred with the Olympics show. We went there. I remember that you spoke about this or we spoke about this here when we were celebrating the locally made sports skits, Africa for Africa sports gear for the athletes. And that was put on camera, it was put on TV. They came to take pictures, they danced and they drank and they celebrated. Completely ignoring the fact that they had signed a deal with Puma. There's news reports this morning, I think it was on punch, I saw it, that Puma will sue the Athletics Federation of Nigeria and Nigeria's Ministry of Sports for terminating their contract or for breaching the contract that they signed. The contract was signed in 2019, it was meant to run till 2022 and part of the agreement was that they would wear Puma to the Olympics. They already had cash, I think it was mentioned yesterday, that it was also meant to be $15,000 for gold medalists to also get $5,000 for bronze, $3,500 for silver and $3,500 for bronze. All these things were properly laid out. It was meant to be a non-disclosure agreement. Documents were signed, it was $2.7 million, I believe, agreement that was signed back then. But because of internal feud and, you know, tussle between two people or two separate factions in this same ministry between the Ministry of Sports and the Athletics Federation of Nigeria, that's where all of this went down the drain. See, what I want to take a look at situations like this in Nigeria, it just goes on to show the level of lack of communication and lack of a relationship between government agencies. Why should an Athletic Federation of the country and the Sports Ministry not be working hand in hand? I mean, that's how it's supposed to work, right? But in a situation like this, the Athletics Federation of Nigeria, its President and Vice-Whip, you know, came out to say that they had been commissioned by the federal government to go out and look for sponsors. I mean, we're talking about how it is sponsors that should be funding this. It's sponsors that should be providing the cash prizes, the kits and all of that. So AFN went out to consult another group, another Athletics or Sportsbody. They struck this deal with Puma in 2019. Everything seemed to be laid out, you know, the fact that they were going to get their kids, about 40 different items in those kits. So we didn't need a situation, we didn't need to have a situation where Nigerian athletes would be washing his jerseys online on TikTok, putting it out and then having to delete it. I have to see, you know, the backlash and all of that from that. So the sad thing is, remember when, you know, Puma signed this deal with Nigeria, the AFN, and Sunday Dari came on board. Then it now became a situation of, how did you get this deal signed? They involved the DSS saying that the Athletics Federation of Nigeria, Ibrahim Gousseau, might have done some shady dealing. The DSS did their investigation and found that this was a valid contract and that no money was paid to anyone. You mentioned yesterday that what if money was paid? The DSS declared this was in 2019 that no money was paid to anyone. This was a valid contract. So it makes you want to ask, why would the, you know, Sports Ministry be seeing the Athletics Federation of Nigeria's President and Vice for going ahead to look for sponsors? I mean, we have these sponsors, so everything that should be done to make sure that our sports team at the Olympics is well represented and that Nigeria is a giant of Africa like we claim to be. I mean, it really is scary. Bonfre put out a statement last year, exactly like I said, that Nigeria, you know, is no longer one of the top footballing countries in the world. We really have gone down the drain and conversations still remain to see if we can rise again. Well, he's mentioned the world should be mentioned in Africa, to be honest. But these are conversations that we'll get into in the course of the program this morning. We have a, you know, very, very interesting lineup of guests that will look into these issues. They look at the Puma, you know, issue of preparation, you know, and wins and losses and all of that all through the program this morning. So stay with us. Coming up next, we have G-Day Johnson joining us with Off The Press. Let's look at the major stories making headlines across Nigeria this morning. Welcome once again.