Table tennis Olympian, Chelsea Edghill, following a request to the National Sports Commission for financial support, is scheduled to receive $1,000,000 to assist in preparation for upcoming tournaments.
This was disclosed yesterday by Director of Sport Steve Ninvalle. According to Ninvalle, “Chelsea Edghill would’ve presented to us, through the GTTA, a very complete proposal. With that, the proposal would’ve included her training. As a Commission, we felt it was important to support and support her throughout the years, but this [$1 million] is just an initial support.”
He further explained, “What we would do, is that we’ll look back after four months, we would see how that training is going and see whether or not we will invest more [money] into Ms Edghill.” He added, “It’s not a done deal that this is just the $1 million we will be giving to Ms Edghill, and we’ll stop there. What we will be doing is looking at her performance during the course of the training.”
Meanwhile, GTTA President, Godfrey Munroe, who spoke on behalf of Edghill, said, “It’s welcoming and it’s commendable that the Ministry and the National Sports Commission is backing its statement with action. We [the GTTA] are happy about this because it shows that we have a partner that we can call on. I know the Director of Sport, being the head of an Association, because he understands the challenges.”
He added, “It’s great to see the manifestation and action from our initial meeting, that we’re here receiving the support for Chelsea. They did say that this is just an appetizer but they will be looking to see how she goes about her training and so on. In our ‘fan out’ meeting a lot of things were discussed.”
Edghill, a former Caribbean U21 Champion, competed at the Tokyo Olympics, becoming Guyana’s first ever player to feature in the discipline. She was also the first female athlete from the English speaking Caribbean to compete in the sport.
Edghill was eliminated in the second round by 17-year-old Shin Yubin of South Korea 11-7, 11-9, 11-1, 12-10. Edghill won her first round match against Fiji’s Sally Yee 11-5, 4-11, 11-3, 11-6, 11-8. She is scheduled to return to local shores shortly.
