Team Botswana has, since its debut in the Olympic Games in 1980, only featured individual sporting codes and is yet to feature in any team sport. Speaking on MmegiOnline's weekly show, Sport On, BNOC's general team manager, Obakeng Ngwigwa, said ahead of the 2024 Paris games, the Olympic committee had an eye on qualification for, amongst others, beach volleyball, boxing, weightlifting, athletics, swimming, and football. The BNOC increased codes from the four that competed at the 2020 Olympic Games to six in Paris. However, only two sporting codes, athletics and swimming, managed to send athletes to France.
Boxing and weightlifting fell off early during the qualification phase. Football saw the Mares enjoy a good run before they were knocked out by Tanzania while the beach volleyball men's team missed qualification by just a whisker after inspired displays at the African Games and the FIVB Beach Volleyball Continental Cup. "The plan is to take more teams. Athletics has always been there; they are the first ones to compete at the Olympics. They are the first to bring a medal and they always have the better performance at each edition of the Olympics. With them, they have a good programme going on so we are trying as the BNOC to help other codes," Ngwigwa said. "We have an Olympic Solidarity scholarship and we are including other codes in each Olympic circle.
The mandate of the scholarship is to prepare the athlete for the next Olympics so our plan for going to LA 2028 is that we want to bring more codes, and more team sports, and we are going to build on what we have. We are still going to try with those six codes and we are starting now. It takes four years to prepare and I would say the government has been very supportive. We were given the funds for Paris and also the funds to start preparations for the next Olympics," said Ngwigwa. The 2024 Olympic team is the most successful Team Botswana in 42 years of participation. The team brought home two medals, the highest in a single Olympic tournament. Botswana now has four medals at the world spectacle, the first in 2012 and the second was won at the 2020 Olympic Games.
