Former World Champion, Ike Quartey
Coach of Ghana’s amateur boxing team, Francis Ofori Asare has slammed former world champion Ike Bazooka Quartey for claiming he played no role in Samuel Takyi success at the 2022 Tokyo Olympic Games.
In an exclusive interview on GhanaWeb’s Sports Check show, Ofori Asare rebutted the claim by the former world champion, noting that he is ignorant about coaching and lacks understanding about nurturing boxing talents.
He also urged Ike Quartey to stay in his lane as a world boxing champion and not to discredit his reputation.
“He’s ignorant about coaching, he doesn’t have the training as a coach. I don’t want to respond technically because he won’t be able to understand that. He’s not a coach, he is a boxer, a world champion and I respect him for that. He’s not a trained coach so he doesn’t understand certain things,” coach Ofori Asare said.
“When he talks about fundamentals can he vividly explain what is fundamentals in boxing. He doesn’t have that knowledge but people hail him because he is a world champion but that does it allow him to criticize unnecessarily,” he added.
Ike Quartey in an interview told Graphic Sports that Samuel Takyi won the bronze on his own strength and not through the efforts of coach Ofori Asare.
“I have no confidence in Coach Asare; he is not a complete coach. It was when I started training Takyi that I realized that Coach Asare had done nothing to him."
“Coach Asare trained Takyi and took him to the Olympics, but I found many faults with the boxer who I’m currently managing and I realized he didn’t get the basics right. This should not be so for an Olympian, a bronze medalist for that matter,” Quartey stated.
Coach Ofori Asare has won over multiple medals for Ghana over the span of 26 years in charge of the Ghana amateur boxing team. He recently led the Black Bombers to win 3 medals at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
Watch the latest editions of Sports Check and GhanaWeb Sports Debate below:
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