By Alpha Barrie

The Chief Executive Officer of the National Paralympics Committee of Sierra Leone (NPC-SLE), Alexander Thullah, has stated that he hopes they can do more for the development of Paralympics sports in Sierra Leone.

The Development Officer of the International Paralympics Committee (IPC), Carolin Rickers, who was in Freetown on a four-day visit, ended her training three-day session for members of the NPC-SLE at the CGEM at 57 John Street where she was presented with  traditional clothes after a statement by Team Leader, Unisa Deen Kargbo.

Speaking, after the training session, the CEO noted that it had been a very interesting three days of training with the International Paralympics Committee representative from Germany, adding that they are now looking forward to implementing the things they learnt.

‘I hope we can do more for the development of Paralympics sports in Sierra Leone. This is the “in country training” which they used to capacitate the different NPCs around the world, but we were fortunate to have a lady who came from the IPC and the good thing about her, she is very familiar with Sierra Leone.

‘It has been a good one! The three days have been very, very hectic. We leant a lot and the only thing that’s left for us is to implement what we’ve learnt. If we can get the proper implementation and try to adapt to some of the things that were introduced to us then that will be very good.

‘But I think these are new ideas although we were doing them before. But the fact is that they were not done the right way but now with this training we’ve come to understand that we need to do more in those areas,’ he said.

He furthered that they’ve learnt that they don’t need to wait for the sponsor to come and meet them; instead they have to search for sponsors and convince them about their movement so that they can get what they are looking for.

‘We had a quite interest moment where we got our strategic plans for 2023. I quite believe that if we can work with all these plans we can be able to change the face of Paralympics sports,’ Thullah stated.

In the area of athlete’s development, the scribe affirmed that Paralympics is about the athletes and not the officials so they need to do more in that area to see how best they can be able to set up a committee that will look into scouting identification of athletes for different sporting disciplines.

‘Presently we have a few athletes and we need to do more to encourage more athletes to come on board so with all these things in mind we are looking at what the future holds for Sierra Leone.

“There are activities on the pipeline. We have a training programme in Ghana for athletes and some coaches and officials so it will be very good and people have been identified for that training which will be another good experience for Paralympics Sierra Leone.

‘I think in a not too distant future we are hoping to see not only the athletes but also people who are interested in people with disability coming on board and see how all of us will come together to promote disabled sports in Sierra Leone.

‘There are institutions that we need to talk with so that they will come and give us their own support so with all that we can make disabled sport attractive,’ he concluded.