A new star is born

Gold medallist Nigeria’s Tobi Amusan poses on the podium during the medal ceremony for the women’s 100m hurdles during the World Athletics Championships at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon on July 24, 2022. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)

There was a celebration amongst the stars. It had been long in coming.

For several years, a young Nigerian female athlete had been knocking on the door of success, to be let in.

It was always so close it became only a matter of time before she was going to make it, and win at any one of the major events around the circuit of a track event that combines sprinting and scaling over hurdles for 100 metres. Hurdling is one of the most technical and challenging races on the tracks.

Not too long ago, she mouthed her frustration to friends and thought briefly of accepting her fate, giving up the sport entirely, and thanking the Creator of the Universe for the relative success she had achieved in her life – fame, a sound grounding in education, a good income from running in the European circuits, and the opportunity to start a project to touch the lives of young girls in the Ogun State of Nigeria where she comes from and to make her life a model they can emulate.

Earlier this year, in February 2022, she visited Nigeria and together with her mentor and greatest supporter (Omoba-Abiola Onasanya – a former national sprinter and US-trained athlete, coach and administrator) they funded the establishment of a sports program in Ijebu Ode that was to eventually become an annual clinic for the certification of coaches, to discover young talented athletes in selected secondary schools in Ogun State, to train those discovered locally, and to prepare the best of them for placement in American Colleges and