Namibian athletes and their management team arrived in Cape Town, South Africa on Friday for the 2023 Toyota South Africa Sports Association for the Physically Disabled (SASAPD) National Championships.

The annual Toyota SASAPD championships brings together athletes from nine South African provinces and other southern African countries to compete in various sporting categories.

The 2023 edition of the championships is scheduled for Cape Town, South Africa from 19 to 22 March, where Team Namibia will compete in para-athletics, para-powerlifting, swimming, para-cycling and goalball.

Forty Namibian athletes will compete in this championship to be held over three days.

Speaking to Nampa on Friday, the team manager for the games Jean-Paul Schmidt who is the treasurer for the Namibia Paralympic Committee (NPC) said their plan of bringing a big team is to give opportunities to the young and upcoming athletes.

“For the first time in the history of NPC, we will have a goalball team competing at these championships. As a body that wants to grow, we are happy to see that apart from athletics there are also other codes. This shows that our goal of having many codes represent the country at the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Paralympic Games can be realised if we continue pushing,” he said.

Schmidt added that the NPC will use this competition as a qualifier for the 2023 IPC African Games slated for Ghana and the IPC World Athletics Championships.

“This is the first international competition that our athletes are competing at and we would love to see them improve on their times as that will improve their ranking and give us more slots for the world champs and first-ever African Games,” Schmidt said.

In 2022, Namibian athletes with disabilities won 30 medals at the Toyota SASAPD in Johannesburg, South Africa. They bagged 20 gold, three silver and seven bronze medals.

Other countries expected to compete at the 2023 SASAPD National Championships are Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Botswana, alongside nine South African provinces.

Source: NAMPA