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Accra-Ghana September 14, 2021
Speech by Ghana Badminton President at Medal Presentation Ceremony of 19 Medal Winners from 2021 Benin Internationals to Director-General, NSA – Part of the targeted three series 2022 Commonwealth Games Qualifiers
- Dear NSA Director-General, Management and Staff of NSA, Board, and Members of Ghana Badminton, players and staff, my fellow team members.
- I wish you a warm welcome and congratulations for the grandeur honour of these medals. It is a great pleasure to see you and the sports authority for this rainy-day presentation of our international laurels. Our team’s overall results were modest and did not live up to the hopes we placed in these 2022 commonwealth competitions, but all of you present today put on excellent performances and your achievements are indisputable. Once again, I congratulate you on these historic country achievements.
- Director-General, of course, as the national and supervisory governing body of the sport, the purpose of today’s meeting is for us to present to you these medals won, but this is not all. I would like to discuss with you, as our best athletes, what we can do to prepare for the subsequent events. Who is better to discuss this subject with than you.
- Today’s modern top-level sport is always a tremendous amount of hard work plus a little bit of luck. But clearly, without concrete and systematic effort, and without unflagging will to achieve results, we would not have succeeded in doing what we did, and we displayed precisely this kind of will in Benin a fortnight ago- winning 18 Bronze Medals and 1 Silver Medal in Seniors and Juniors categories for the two-week event. We also achieved Africa’s second-best player at the tournament in the person of Francis Obeng Shang- the last notable of this was 10 years ago in 2011 in Mauritius.
- I want to address a separate thanks to your coaches, management team and our indefatigable High-Performance Committee of the Association. They are always there not only to help the athletes develop their physical capabilities but also maintain them in good mental shape too – it is essential for the athletes after all to be able to keep a balanced state and withstand the intense psychological pressure they come under. Our Road to Africa Games in Ghana and the 2022 Commonwealth Games, of course, represent the peak of this kind of pressure, and so the coaches also made a very important contribution to your victories as a nation.
- It is no secret for anyone that sport in our country is going through a change in generations today. In one sense, you could say that a change of generations is always taking place, of course, only sometimes it happens quicker, and sometimes it is a slower process. But whatever the case, many of our young athletes have shown that our African Games team does have good potential, that our young sports people do have talent, and in maturity in the next three years to the 2024 France Olympics through our High-Performance Plan.
- DG, I nevertheless want to note the memorable performance that we saw from our young medallist winner, Racheal Quarcoo. Her admiration won her, and her team a five-year scholarship to participate in the Benin Internationals annual event.
- She will be turning 13 years this week, and we hope that tomorrow will find her in the best of spirits. We will put her in a good mood today and tomorrow you can add to it. Congratulations! The example set by the renowned mixed team also played a big part in these victories. We saw this in the stubborn determination of our mixed team and seniors winning bronze medals respectively in the competition.
- We are the only Mix team sport in the country. It is very important to see that our athletes are also competitive in what are relatively revamped sports for our country. Ghana Badminton is on the rise again, after almost sixty years of our existence in Ghana. It is an excellent synthesis when we win medals in sports in which we have never achieved high results in the past and win medals in events of the sports in which we have always been strong.
- We have analysed our results, both objective and subjective. We have made commitments of greater value in funds and appeal to your office to assist us in defray the cost we incurred. We are grateful for the help given to us by the Ministry of Youth & Sports and the National Sports Authority and expecially also for our major food sponsor Stallion Distributors. We are grateful
- This has not been easy managing creditors and we appeal to your office to assist us in defraying this cost. Much sadness is that no team member has even received a penny from this tournament in allowances and your fatherly love to us should shine on us this rainy day.
- Overall, DG we have excellent potential. No matter how much emotion gets vented on our team, on specific heads of federations, on sports officials, you know that we all realise what you are capable of, and we clearly have enough time to prepare for the next games to put forward our best team and put on our best performance, even more so as this will be our qualifiers.
- I hope that by then everyone who will compete will be familiar with all the nuances of our center. They have done well, work hard and are doing everything possible to achieve results and show what our country is capable of.
- Director-General, our sports provide for internal appeals and resolution mechanisms per the Constitution for all members who are in good standing, and we ask all persons to use these avenues in grievances from members if only they are in good standing. Our constitution has been for the last two years a model for even other federations in the country, who are rewriting their constitution using ours as a model-This every member who is a citizen of our sport is revered.
- We have a lot of work ahead. Once more, we congratulate all of you on the team and sincerely on what is perhaps a very significant occasion for most of us. I wish on behalf of all of us my sincere congratulations! To your office and for the best interest in the development of sport in our country.
- From the hills, street training and gulley soils of Agona Nyakrom through to Osu Kinkawe, from Agotime Kpetoe, and Bimbilla- we present to you our 18 Medals and 1 Silver won from our recent international event, which is unprecedented in twenty years in the annals of the Sport.
- Thank you
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