Federation blames Olympic ouster on jetlag

Jetlag, rather than ill-preparedness and technical imcompetence, was resonsible for Nigeria's woeful outing at the recently concluded female volleyball Athens 2004 Olympic qualifier in Tokyo, an official of the Nigeria Volleyball Federation [NVBF] told nigeriasports.com Thursday in Lagos. The national female volleyball team had recently returned from the Far East,precisely Japan,where they were roundly beaten in their last attempt to book a ticket to the Olympic Games which holds in Athens,Greece next August. Boye Ajayi,spokesman of the NVBF who was among the officials who accompanied the team said lopsided flight arrangement and delay by the Japanese embassy in the issuance of visa had an adverse effect on the players. "Everybody knew the team had the best of preparation,the sports authorities really tried in that aspect," he submitted." But we started having problems when the Japanese embassy here[Nigeria] did not release our passports on time,in fact the passports were not made available to the team until the day they were to travel out." He revealed that as a result of the delay the team had to board a South Africa airline flight to Johanessburg where "we spent complete 12 hours at the airport there before we could board another flight to Hong Kong. "The flight to Hong Kong was 14 hours.And from Hong Kong we took another flight to Tokyo spending 6 hours in the air.Eventually we got there exactly on competition day,when the qualifiers were to start," explained Ajayi. Not unexpectedly, the Nigerian squad lost their opening game, dropping all three sets against highly rated Russia and they went on to lose subsequent matches in similar fashion to Italy,Korea and hosts Japan. Ajayi advised the sports authorities to prevail on foreign embassies in Nigeria to always give prompt attention to visa application by Nigerian sports men and women wishing to travel out to honour competitions or other important assignments. "Obviously this is not the first time we are expariencing this kind of thing, but we should strive to put a stop to it.I don't think we accord them the same treatment when they want to visit this country," he averred.
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