The Congolese State has invested no less than 67 million euros in sports infrastructure for the Games of La Francophonie. A boon for the country’s athletes who have long suffered from the lack of adequate training or competition venues. Like boxing and basketball.
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Correspondent,
The apprentice boxers stamp their feet on the concrete. In a synchronized and dancing rhythm between four posts. A rope around it, and the ring takes shape. This is briefly the training ground of the Barambu Boxing Club, north of Kinshasa. Residents rehearse their ranges in the open air at the entrance of a house without a fence, crossed by a sewage drainage channel and under the gaze of cars and passers-by a few meters away.
Like this legendary club, founded by Kibalé Ngunza and which saw Congolese champions like Sumbu Kalambaye or Martin Bakolé, boxing clubs in Congo, just like national teams, ” manage ” for training. But this situation should soon be combined with the past, thanks to the new infrastructures built for the Francophone Games.
Between the new accommodation centers and the gymnasiums built, the boxers will see their daily life transformed. ” It’s almost a miracleenthuses, Valérie Kayumba, national technical director of boxing and trainer at the Barambu club. I already see housing in the infrastructures. It will stay, it will allow us to house the young people, have them on hand to train them. Even the national teams never had that. Gymnasiums will also allow clubs or teams to train in a shelter and no longer in the open. These infrastructures will benefit the youth and we will even be able to organize fights. You put me in these conditions, I take out a world champion, because the material, we have it.
Less than 5 km from Barambu, the Stade des Martyrs in Kinshasa has undergone a facelift. Well prepared for the occasion, the enclosure has been equipped with two gymnasiums which house two basketball courts. On the brand new floor, the basketball players of the DR Congo warm up before meeting Chad. On the bench, coach Adé Coco observes his daughters discovering their room. He dreamed of it. ” That’s greathe lets go, ecstatic, his eyes shining. It was unacceptable that the DRC did not have a sports hall, it was a question of political will. Now that’s it, it’s great. It is now a guarantee of success and development. »
Didier Mbenga, “the happiest man”
The national teams which disputed their international meetings on the ground of the French high school of Kinshasa, for lack of infrastructures with the standards, will from now on be able to count on their public with these gymnasiums of 5000 places. ” We hardly had an audience for basketball anymore because we were playing in the sun, it was complicated. But there, the public will come back and the stadiums will be full predicts Adé Coco.
Ambassador of the Francophonie Games, Didier Mbenga, former Belgian international basketball player, born in Kinshasa, does not hide his satisfaction when discovering the new infrastructures. ” I am the happiest man because finally, the Congolese youth will have infrastructures to develop betterconfides the imposing pivot of 2.13m, NBA champion with the Lakers in 2009 and 2010. It’s important, I know what I’m talking about. We didn’t have that before. »
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