The Nigeria Taekwondo Federation has registered its team for the African Qualification Tournament for Tokyo 2020 Olympics, ahead of the 10th January 2020 deadline set by World Taekwondo.
The 2020 Africa Qualification Olympic Tournament is slated for 22nd to 23rd February, 2019 in Rabat, Morocco.
According to the NTF, the team will be unveiled few days to the event in February to prevent giving a tactical advantage to opposing teams, whose team list remain unknown.
The NTF disclosed that the organisers ensured to remove the option of advertising team lists from the Global Membership System, thus leaving the technical crews of prospective team list with forecasting headaches as to the top athletes that will be presented by various teams.
The President of Nigeria Taekwondo Federation, Margaret Binga has assured that the most in-form and consistent athletes would represent Nigeria at the event.
Binga said, “We have been preparing for this event for a long time and I am certainly optimistic that we will be at Tokyo. We have a young and dynamic team and an experienced technical crew. The entire team is driven and motivated and this is important to achieve our objectives, despite the paucity of funds that has been challenging.”
“Our current system is second to none in identifying the most in-form athletes and our technical team has been ruthless in making the final decisions. Registering our team is an important first step towards securing the tickets and certainly points to our seriousness in achieving this objective.”
At the last qualification tournament, Nigeria missed the registration deadline and had to pay a late registration fine in order to participate at the event.
Nigeria Taekwondo was at the Athens 2004, Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016 Qualification tournaments, and only failed to qualify for the Rio 2016 Olympics.
