From montreal to Lagos in 47 years – The story of forgotten heroes

Modupe Oshikoya

On July 16, 1976, a brand-new Nigerian Airways DC 10 aircraft took off from the Montreal International airport, Canada, piloted by renowned Captain All-well Brown, and heading for Lagos. It was a human cargo of 45 young Nigerian athletes whose action helped changed several chapters in human history

47 years later, on July 28th 2023, another plane, AirPeace Dreamliner 777, carrying the surviving members of that same contingent of athletes, piloted by Co-Captains, Dr. Allen Onyema and Professor Eghosa Osaghae, will be landing in Lagos, Nigeria.

This is definitely a forgotten story in Nigeria’s Sports and Diplomacy history. The challenge now is that I have been trying to compile an authentic list of the athletes involved in the eventful plot that started in 1976.

Since I raised the issue on social media last week, it has taken all of that period till now to get most of the jigsaws to fit the puzzle. It is not complete yet, even as I write this.

The story is that, the International Olympic Committee, IOC, evicted the contingents of 27 African countries, as well as Guyana and Iraq, from the Olympic Village that summer evening in 1976. Those were the countries that responded to the call of the Supreme Council for Sports in Africa to boycott the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games in protest against New Zealand’s participation, a country that had maintained sporting relations with South Africa that had been banned from the Olympic movement for their Apartheid system of government.

Nigeria played a lead role. If young South Africans knew the country played in the 1970s,1980s and 1990s for their liberation and emancipation, including how innocent Nigerian athletes gave up their lifetime dreams to support freedom for the