History as guide to gold medals accomplishments in Paris

Ese Brume…One of athletes Team Nigeria is expecting to win medal at the Paris 2024 Olympics

Twenty-one years ago, Nigeria’s former 400m hurdler, Victor Okorie, was part of the nation’s contingent to the then IAAF World Athletics Championships in Saint Denis, France.  With no training grants to aid their preparations, a team of 15 men and 12 women left Lagos and arrived in Paris to compete with their counterparts from other parts of the world, who were ready for the greatest track and field showpiece.

The Nigerian team, which had top athletes such as, Deji Aliu, Uchenna Emedolu, Mary Onyali, Endurance Ojokolo and Vivian Chukwuemeka, failed woefully in Paris, as the athletes ran into heavy storm. None of them could make any appreciable impact at the championships.  Now, Okorie feels there is the need for the Federal Government to learn from past mistakes to save Team Nigeria from another pitfall in Paris.

“Training grants are meant to assist athletes in their preparations for a major competition,” Okorie told The Guardian from his base in the United States during the week. “We got to the competition venue in Paris in 2003, only for our officials to hand an envelope containing some hard currency over to us. They said, ‘this is your chopping grant’. It was a shock to me because that was the first and only time I heard such word in my entire sporting career.

“‘Chopping grants’ in place of training grants for athletes? It was so sad, but it happened in Nigeria’s sports. We ended up not doing well at the championship because of our poor preparations,” he said.  One of the sad memories of Paris 2003 IAAF Championships was the protest by Nigerian athletes, and their subsequent boycott of the 4x100m and 4x400m relay for women.  Rather