A painful death, a sweet victory and the FESTAC of sports

Odegbami

Last week, a great Nigerian patriot, lawyer, former football player, proprietor of a professional club in Canada, sports administrator, international businessman and supreme sports marketer, a quiet gentleman that brought Nike to Africa, and to Nigeria in 1993, a man who played a major role in the successes recorded by Nigeria in the birth and growth of the Super Eagles into a global football brand between 1993 and 1998, the man who organised and funded the Nike International Under-16 Tournament in Lagos in 2001 that brought Mikel Obi from the obscurity of a secondary school in Jos to the attention of the world, Chief Noel Okorougo, the Ugomba, died in Geneva, Switzerland, after his struggle to beat cancer failed. He would have turned 70 next December.

The very kind and quiet philanthropist was my very good friend. We shared some truly terrific times in several locations around the world.

On one occasion he hosted two of the athletes under my management, Chioma Ajunwa and Charity Opara, for a high-altitude training programme in Kenya, shortly after the 1996 Olympic Games. It was an experiment to find out the impact of elevated heights in training sprinters.

Noel was the perfect host, his organisation taking care of most of the cost of our stay in the East African country, whilst IGI, the giant Insurance company in Nigeria owned by late Remi Olowude, another great sponsor of sports in Nigeria at the time, took care of the rest.

Noel had just opened the Nairobi office of his Prosports/Nike organisation. One day, I was to leave the two athletes behind in Kenya to continue with their training whilst I returned to Nigeria. Noel took me to the Nairobi International airport that fateful afternoon, and as both of us were