22 Sep 2016

After Botswana athletes failed to win at least one medal at Rio Olympic Games, all eyes were now on the paralympian, Keatlaretse Mabote to redeem the countries’ pride at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games.

But that was not the case as he finished on position three, in 400m T12 heat recording a Personal Best of 51.33 and failed to  proceed to the next stage.

Coach Raj Rathedi said they had initially wanted to win a medal, but that was not to be as they were faced with a myriad challenges during their preparations for the games. 

“By the way you don’t prepare at the competition, but you prepare well in advance before the actual competition. 

I can confidently say when preparing an athlete for Olympics or Paralympics, you need a lot of support to make sure they are in shape,” he said.

Rathedi said he only met Mabote five months before the games.

He said he had to make an assessment, to check both his physical and technical ability.

He said during his assessment, he discovered that the athlete had not been doing any form of training, including off-season training.

He then had to do a programme in such a way that it would accommodate him since he had not been training.

Together with another coach, Justice Dipeba, he said they designed a programme that would compensate his lack of training, adding that they had to do that within a short period of time. 

“We had a training camp in Potchefstroom, but after that everything fell apart. here was no support, given to this athlete, except the fact that he then went to China and Germany.

Rathedi said also the athlete was not given medical support and he did not have spikes and training equipment.

He said with two weeks to go before the games, they had a brief discussion with the athlete and agreed to forget about the medal, but they should only focus on his PB.

“We left Botswana knowing that we are going to bring his PB back home. That what we did, it was frustrating for me to motivate the athlete, with all the challenges ahead of us,” he said.

However, Botswana National Olympic Committee, chief executive officer, Tuelo Serufho said his organisation had released purchased order to the supplier ordering  training equipment for the athlete, which Paralympic Association of Botswana (PASSOBO) had requested from them.

“The athletes had training attire and spikes. Again we didn’t treat him differently from the Olympic team,” he said. 

 PASSOBO secretary general Titus Keboile admitted that there was communication break down between his committee and the technical team.

 “As PASSOBO, we will not know the kind of spikes the athletes needed unless we are told by the coach. Same thing applies to attire and the fact that he was training alone without a partner.  I think we had a communication problem,” he said.

To some extent, Keboile said PASSOBO had failed the athlete. 

However, he said resigning from the committee would not be the solution. Ends