The Ghana Olympic Committee President, Ben Nunoo Mensah, says he will consider it a success if Ghana is able to qualify up to 14 athletes for next year’s Tokyo Olympic Games.
So far, five Ghanaian athletes have booked their seats in the global showpiece with less than half of the qualifying events left.
Ghana took 14 Olympians to the last Games in Rio in 2016 and Nunoo Mensah says without significant investment in sports in the last four years, matching the 2016 numbers will be deemed a success.
“All that we had planned as a GOC was that, if the last Olympics in Rio we had nine or twelve athletes, then at least let’s try and add one more,” Nunoo Mensah stated on Citi Tv’s The Tracker.
“Then as a nation we can see that things are getting better, it’s better than our numbers dwindling down.
“But as much as we want to do that, the problems and challenges that hold us back are more.
“Other countries spend four years training, we spend four months and then we put all the athletes together and say we are taking them to pregames, it doesn’t work that way,” he concluded.
Ghana failed to earn a single medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics, continuing a drought that began at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona and will be looking to end that drought in the now rescheduled Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
