Ex-national athlete chides athletics chief
A former national athlete, Professor Charles Yendork, has called on the president of the Ghana Athletics Association (GAA), Professor Francis Dodoo, to resign from his post following Ghana’s abysmal performance oat the World Athletics Championship in London last month.
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Professor Yendork described Dodoo's seven-year reign at the GAA as a total failure and said he expected him to call it quits because the inability of Ghanaian athletes to qualify from the preliminary stages of the World Championship was an indictment on the sport’s governing body.
He added that the GAA needed a new leadership to transform the sport in the country as Ghanaian athletes had failed to make any significant impact at international championships in recent years.
Prof. Yendork, who owns an athletics academy known as the Seven-Four Sports Club at Lashibi in Accra, told the Graphic Sports that Ghana possessed a lot of talents in the sport and needed a transformational leader who could help bring out the best in the talents.
"It will be in the interest of Professor Francis Dodoo to resign from his post as the president of the GAA because he has failed the country.
"Our athletes could not once again qualify from the preliminaries of the recently held World Athletics Championship and I believe much is not being done to help revive the dwindling fortunes of the sport," he said.
As a former supervisor and head coach at the USA Athletics High Performance Centre at San Diego, and head athletics coach in the Oklahoma State University, Professor Yendork advised Prof Dodoo to desist from sending upcoming athletes to lower-rated colleges in the United States and said these talented athletes would be better served at American schools where they would have more competitions.
He explained that enrolling these young athletes at top colleges in the US would provide them with better opportunities to develop their talents under the mentorship of some of the best trainers in the world.
