Coventry Leads All Africa Games Team

The team also includes Ngoni Makusha who finished fourth at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, missing out of a medal by just a centimetre as well as sprinter Brian Dzingai, and sensei Samson Muripo who won the world kyokushin title in 2009.

Although Muripo failed to retain his title at the world karate kyokushin championships held early this month, losing out in the final in controversial circumstances, he remains one of Zimbabwe’s biggest hopes for a gold medal.

The three, Coventry, Makusha, and Dzingai, are beneficiaries of the Olympic scholarship where they have been at universities in the United States of America doing both sports and education.

The 2011 All Africa Games team’s head of delegation Joseph Muchechetere revealed that, Coventry who has won seven medals at the Olympic Games, a gold, a silver and a bronze medal at the 2004 Games in Athens, Greece and a gold and three silvers at the 2008 Games in Beijing, will lead the team for the games set for Mozambique for the first time in the games’ history.

Muchechetere said they have come up with the final team after going through submissions from all the sporting associations that make up the Zimbabwe Olympic Committee.

Some of the sporting disciplines, among them, basketball, volleyball, and soccer have to go through the qualifying stages. Although the men’s teams have failed to qualify, for the sporting festival, the women’s soccer team, the Mighty Warriors and the basketball teams have booked their places at the sporting extravaganza.

The Zimbabwean team is hoping to improve on the 23 medals they won at the last games which were held in Algiers, Algeria in 2007.