Heed to Saminu’s appeal

 BEYOND Abdul Rasheed Saminu’s sensational triumph in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) East Preliminary Round lies a call every athletics enthusiast must heed to.

Saminu is Ghana’s latest athletics kid on the block after breaking Benjamin Azamati’s national record in 100m set in 2022.

Azamati set the previous record with a time of 9.87seconds (wind assisted) but Saminu showed class when he dropped it to 9.86 seconds to draw comparisons with South Africa’s leading athlete, Akani Simbine, who clocked 9.90 seconds this year.

The feat earned Saminu a place at the World Athletics Championship to be held in the city of Tokyo in Japan in September.

In that moment of joy, he stormed X (formerly Twitter), where he made a passionate appeal to managers of the sport back home in Ghana.

“Hopefully more to come and I want the world to know we got talents in Ghana. It’s an honour to be the new national record holder…local based athletes deserve more attention as well” he wrote on X.

Previously a typical local athlete that hails from the village of Nanumba in Ghana where he switched to athletics after failing to make a mark in football, Saminu has seen it all at that level of sports in Ghana; the reason why his call cannot and must not be ignored.

In Ghana, football at the lower tiers is often described as ‘wilderness’, a situation that suggest the harsh and difficult circumstances under which clubs navigate their way to the top.

The story with athletics is not different, if not more difficult than football which offers so many platform for players in every corner of the country to showcase their skills.

The now University of South Florida (USF) athlete understands the challenges his peers face in Ghana, trying to rise to the very top level.

The biggest obstacle for athletics in Ghana is the unavailability of infrastructure. Currently, the Legon Sports Stadium remains the only recognised athletics facility in the whole country, courtesy of Ghana’s hosting of the Africa Games Accra 2023 event.

Other facilities around the country are in terrible shapes, and readily coming to mind is the Elwak Sports Stadium which became an alternative venue after the running tracks at the Accra Sports Stadium was scrapped to enable Ghana increase the capacity of the structure to host AFCON 2008.

From 2008 to 2023 when the Africa Games was hosted, nothing was done to develop and promote athletics in Ghana.

Apart from infrastructure, lack of regular competitions have been the biggest bane of the sport as young and promising athletes turn their running spikes into boots to play community football after their second cycle education.

One may ask why but the reason is simple. After completing Senior High School, the next hope for competition lies in their ability to make it to a tertiary institution where they either participate in University games or what was known as Polytechnic (now technical universities) games.

For those that fail to progress, it means the end of a burgeoning career in sports, notably athletics.

That, however, appear to have been dealt with in a way as universities now consider brilliant sports athletes for admission but that’s quite limited.

Unlike football which has clubs scattered all around, athletics have few clubs to accommodate the unlucky ones.

Now in the case where few competitions were organised, prizes presented at some of these competitions were nothing to write home about.

I have witnessed the organisation of such events in the past where winners of some disciplines received pressing irons, fans, heaters, cameras and other products.

From such products, one wonders how such athletes without proper management teams are able to survive and also prepare for other events.

For an athlete with such humble beginnings to his current status to make such call, it truly mean there are a lot of things fundamentally wrong with the athletics system in Ghana.

The current managers of the sport led by the dynamic Bawa Fuseini appear to be doing very well to improve their fortunes but while focusing on getting athletes to qualify for the big events, they must find ways to address concerns such as the one coming from Saminu.

 By Andrew Nortey