CHELEMU

By SHAMAOMA
 MUSONDA-
GOVERNMENT and the National Olympic Committee (NOC) say they are not so attracted to a gold medal from this year’s Commonwealth Games in Scotland but that their interest is for Zambia to strike gold at the 2016 Brazil Olympics.
The Zambian contingent of athletes to the 2014 Commonwealth Games have been told to make the Glasgow outing as a stepping stone to getting an Olympic gold medal that Zambia badly needs.
Director of Sport, Bessy Chelemu said in Lusaka that the Zambian group of sportsmen and women should ensure their target was the Rio De Janeiro Olympic Games and take the Commonwealth Games as one of their high-level trial competition.
“You should know that the target is the Olympics in Brazil in 2016 and whatever you do should be looking to the Olympics so that we finally get the gold medal we have been wanting for a very long time. We can not continue picking up lesser medals,” she said.
Zambia has never won a gold medal from the Olympics with the best effort being a silver won by Samuel Matete at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics in the United States of America.
But Zambia has two gold medals to show from the Commonwealth Games and both coming from the boxing fraternity in form of legendary, Lottie Mwale and more recent, Kennedy Kanyanta, who ironically is the national boxing coach for the 2014 Commonwealth Games team.
Chelemu said it was time to refocus on the goals Zambia wanted to achieve the ultimate target – an Olympic gold.
NOC secretary general, Hazel Kennedy said her organistion was still insisting the that sports associations should move away from making excuses on their failure to deliver gold.
Kennedy said NOC had identified up to four affiliate associations they believed had the potential to bring Zambia an Olympic gold and had since been working closely with the sports bodies to ensure the athletes got the needed technical requirements.