The Herald
Grace Chingoma Senior Sports Reporter
THE National Athletics Association of Zimbabwe wants to have more athletes qualifying for this year’s global and continental meets.
The local association is targeting to increase the number of athletes who will compete at this year’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary, as well as the Under-20 Africa Athletics Championships in Lusaka, Zambia.
They have earmarked five athletes to post World Championships qualification times.
The meet will be in Hungary from August 19 to 27 and with the 100m, 1 500m, and 10 000m events all on the programme, the best sprinters, middle-distance runners and long-distance runners will all be on the track.
Already marathon runner Isaac Mpofu has qualified for the Budapest Championships after posting the qualification time at the Valencia Marathon in December.
Last year, Mpofu together with triple jumper Chengetayi Mupaya and sprinter Tinotenda Matiyenga were the three athletes that represented Zimbabwe at the World Championships in Oregon, United States.
Mpofu made the top 10 at last year’s meet when he raced home in 2 hours 7 minutes 56 seconds.
Mpofu then competed in the Valencia Marathon in Spain in December setting another new national record for the second time in a row clocking 2 hours 6 minutes 48 seconds. This feat saw him qualifying for both the Budapest Championships and the 2024 Paris Olympics.
NAAZ president, Tendai Tagara, feels four more athletes can achieve that feat and post qualification times and join Mpofu in Budapest.
“Our target for 2023 is to have at least five athletes qualifying for the World Championships in Budapest, in terms of marathon runners and track runners that is our target,” said Tagara.
The national association have also set their sights on sending a bigger delegation to the Under-20 Africa Athletics Championships that will be held in neighbouring Zambia in April.
Last year NAAZ had two athletes at the World Athletics Under-20 Championships in Colombia.
Sprinters Panashe Nhenga and Denzel Simusialela competed at the meet. And for the biennial African junior championships, NAAZ are confident that many athletes will post the qualification times.
“We are also hoping that we have juniors who reach the finals at the Africa Junior Championships that will take place in Zambia at the end of April.
“We want to send quite a big number of athletes, we want to send quite a big number of officials and coaches,” Tagara said.
As a way of motivating coaches and officials to work on athletes to qualify, NAAZ has incentivised the process.
“My philosophy is that at the junior level, for you to accompany a team or an athlete, you must have an athlete who has qualified in that event.
“So in Zambia, our bonus or thank you to our coaches is accompanying your successful athlete so it is an incentive to our coaches who are handling our juniors.
“So we are targeting good performances at these Championships,” said Tagara.
The association also has the African Games on their calendar summing up a busy international calendar for them.
The African Games will be held in Ghana on dates yet to be confirmed.
“We also want to participate well at the African Games in 2023 and hope to do well and have athletes that reach the finals.
“We want to have a better performance at these Games than what we did in the last edition,” said Tagara.
NAAZ were happy with the 2022 athletics season which they felt came with improved fortunes as the discipline recovered well post-Covid-19.
The association managed to post some achievements locally, securing sponsorship for the Junior Championships as well as hosting numerous Championships.