The President of Nigeria Wrestling Federation, Daniel Igali said gold medallists at the Governor Wike challenge will automatically be number one the national team ranking.
The event comes up from November 23rd to 30th, 2017 at the Indoor Sports Hall of the Alfred Diette-Spiff Civic Center in Port Harcourt.
In an exclusive interview with aclsports.com, the Olympic champion said the event will act as the yard stick to select the national wrestling team that will represent Nigeria at the 2018 African Wrestling championships in Port Harcourt and the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia.
He added that the tournament is important for all athletes aspiring to represent Nigeria at the 2018 African wrestling championships in Port Harcourt.
“The gold medalists at the Gov. Wike challenge will automatically be number one on the national team ranking. However a month before the African championships we will conduct final trials to select the national team members”, he said.
“There will be 90 gold medals at stake. It will be five intense days of wrestling in freestyle, Greco Roman and female wrestling at the Diete Spiff civic centre, Port Harcourt”, the commonwealth champion said.
“We can therefore say we would have hosted four national tournaments this year. Four local tournaments is a good score anywhere in the World, but we hope funding, especially at the corporate level will increase so we can even host more tournaments next year”, he added.
He said, “If we expect to win medals at the world championships and Olympic Games as we are indeed capable of, we must have regular discovery of talents and there is no better opportunity than this tournament”.
