The Chairman of the National Sports Commission, Shehu Dikko, has reacted to the power outage which occurred during the men’s 10,000m final of the 2024 National Sports Festival at the MKO Abiola Sports Complex. He recently revealed that the power outage was caused by a technical glitch.
The men’s 10,000m final was the last race on the second day of athletics at the 22nd edition of the games, and the stadium was thrown into darkness midway through the event, lasting for about 20 minutes as the athletes completed the race in the dark.
Plateau State’s Francis James eventually won the race in a time of 30:36:50, but the long-distance specialist has since said that the unexpected power outage during the final disrupted his rhythm and denied him a chance to finish with a much faster time.
Speaking at a World Press Conference in Abeokuta, Dikko announced that the outage occurred due to the new state of the renovated stadium.
According to him, such technical glitches are completely normal with a new infrastructure, and the fact that it was resolved immediately is definitely worthy of praise.
Dikko maintained that the situation could’ve been much worse if the glitch took the whole day to rectify, but the quick fix proved that the team was more than ready for potential disruptions.
Read Also: Defection Is Part Of The Game – President Tinubu
“We had just left the stadium when that happened.
Basically, what happened was a technical glitch that can happen at a new infrastructure like this, which has worked for many days continuously. It could have been worse if it had taken the whole day to get it back on track. It was resolved immediately, and that showed we were on top of it.
Unfortunately, it happened when an event that couldn’t be stopped was going on. They were doing the men’s 10,000m race and we couldn’t have stopped them,” he said.
The Chairman of the National Sports Commission concluded by saying that better contingency plans would be in place to prevent a repeat of the mishap in future events.
“In the long term, probably we will have some contingency plans like solar, depending on the load and other conditions that we have to factor,” he said.
