Fencing can win medals for Nigeria at 2028 Olympics, says Samuel

Fencing is one of the fastest growing sports in the country. The sport, which narrowly failed to qualify for the Paris 2024 Olympics, losing in the final qualifying hurdle to African giants, Egypt and Tunisia, has been on a grassroots development programme that has seen it producing talented young fencers in recent years.

Now, having gotten so close to making it to the last Olympic Games, the Nigeria Fencing Federation (NFF) has started a programme that would ensure that it doesn’t miss the cut at the next Games in Los Angeles in 2028.

At a parley with media executives in Lagos, president of the Fencing Federation, Adeyinka Samuel, said that the federation aims to make the sport popular and get as many people as people interested in it. That way, he added, the body will have enough talents to build into world class fencers.

He said part of the development programme is to ensure that fencers attend as many championships as possible, both home and abroad, adding that the essence is to make the athletes be abreast of every new innovation in the sport.
“As a federation, we have four cardinal objectives. Our objective is to host as many championships as possible because it will help us get as many Nigerians as people into the game. Travelling for these competitions in Europe or any other foreign country requires a lot of money and when we bring such events to Nigeria, our budget is lower and we have more Nigerians participating.

“Hosting these competitions also motivates people to partner with us, and it also helps us to create awareness within the sport when top fencers do their thing in Nigeria.

“The second arm is to develop elite fencers to world-class athletes and we have a programme that we are following to develop athletes