Gorgeous martial artist Thursdaline Peters is the youngest officially recognized World International Taekwondo level two referee. She has been selected as one of the ten Olympics evaluators from Africa, and she is looking forward to participating at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Peters a keep fit entrepreneur spoke of her experiences at the recently concluded African Games, where Nigeria won one gold, one silver and four bronze medals.
Nigeria’s overall outing:
“Taekwondo participation in this 13 African Games for Nigerian athletes has been a great success, a great achievement considering the short time the athletes had to prepare. The athletes were mentally ready, they worked on themselves and the coaches really assisted on make sure they are helped psychologically and other aspects. There was no distraction and everyone was focused strictly on the purpose of coming to the African Games, they put up their best. It is a great outing as against what people would have thought, because of the short time.
“Compared to other Games where they had to go on a training tour, for this Games there was no training tour, they stayed in Nigeria and trained did everything in Nigeria, all their short comings could have been a factor to reduce the effect of their performances but in the end they did not look at these short comings they pushed themselves, they individually psyched themselves, even some of the athletes who did not get medal, they pushed they didn’t just relent. Their overall performance was great.”
Competition and officiating:
“Competition, compared with what we had in the past I would say it is basically the same. But if we want to compare we have to look also at technological development, things have been updated. There’s instant video replays, where you can check if there is a mistake this was not the case in the past; there was a lot of cheating, a lot of atrocities happened. Now we have the technology everyone is seeing everything, if you want to protest there is video replays.
“The competition was even. It used to be the north Africans topping the charts, but this time around it was like a tug of war between the North Africans and West Africans, there was no going back but this time around everyone really pushed. Nigeria came out strong.”
Elizabeth Anyanacho’s chances at the Olympics:
It was not a surprised Elizabeth qualified for the Olympics. She is vast tin the game is well exposed, well-grounded and being in Europe training is an added advantage to her performance. She has the opportunity to be in many European Open where many athletes going to the Olympics are training and competition, she has really improved over time.
“Her qualifying for the Olympics will bring a positive impact to Nigerian as a whole. We can only plead with the government, I know they are doing their best, but we are only pledging that they should do the right thing and right time early enough so that her training would be solely focused on the Olympics, rather than she thinking about her personally affairs or wants.
Experience as International referee:
“I am level two, second class world international taekwondo referee and currently running the Olympic evaluation process in taekwondo, I’m one of the top ten selected to do the evaluation process in Africa, so it is a plus for Nigeria. I’ve gathered a lot of experience over time by traveling to different championship around the world, with little support from the federation, I have been able to get to this level, I’m only hoping that the government can support more because most of the time we spend our own money to travel to courses to get updated, if we don’t do this nobody will do it for us.
“With my experience I’ve been able to organize some referee courses and competitions and have used my experience to support and built some referees to make sure that things are done the right way, the rules are upheld, the rules are applied in competitions and in fairness to the best athletes. This is what I have done and still doing, we need a standard refereeing course so that when have more empowered referees we would have confidence in our athletes, when we have more experienced referees it would help our athletes to build on their fighting skills and it would also help them to do the right thing. They would be able to check themselves.”