Two of Nigeria’s brightest medal hopes at the Tokyo Olympics this summer, Ese Brume and Tobiloba Amusan are out of the race for the US$20,000 top prize for winners of each event as the 2020 World Indoor Tour train comes to its seventh and final stop on Saturday, February 21 at the Villa de Madrid Meeting in Madrid, Spain.
Brume,competing indoors for the second season in her career is second in the long jump standing with 14 points behind Ukraine’s Maryna Bekh-Romanchuk who holds a dominant 30 points lead.
The 24 year old will however feel fulfilled for setting new personal best in each of the three indoor meetings she participated in this season.
The Nigerian stormed the ORLEN Copernicus Cup in Toruń, Poland early this month with a 6.41m personal best she set in Istanbul in February 2017 but left with a new 6.62m lifetime best to jump above Beatrice Utondu-Okoye (6.54m) into third in the Nigerian all-time list behind Chioma Ajunwa (6.97m) and Blessing Okagbare (6.87m).
Six days after her 2020 indoor debut in Poland, Brume soared into another lifetime best this time at the ISTAF Indoor meeting at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Berlin, Germany where she jumped 6.79m.
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Brume wasn’t done yet. She soared high and landed with a new 6.82m lifetime best at the Meeting Hauts-de-France Pas-de-Calais at the Arena Stade Couvert in Liévin, France to end her indoor season on a high.
Amusan threaded a similar path as she also raced into a new lifetime best albeit she ended up finishing fourth in the 60m hurdles standings with 22 points behind reigning World Champion in the 100m hurdles outdoor, Nia Ali of the USA (27 points), fellow American, Christina Clemons (24 points) and Belarus’ Alina Talay (23 points).
The highlight of Amusan’s campaign was her blistering 7.84 seconds personal best-setting run at the indoor meeting in Karlsruhe,Germany at the end of January.
Brume and Amusan will now shift their focus to the outdoor season which starts in April enroute to Tokyo, Japan for the Olympic Games where they will be hoping to emulate their predecessors, Ajunwa and Okagbare who won gold and silver in the long jump in 1996 and 2008 respectively and Glory Alozie who raced to a silver medal finish in difficult circumstances at the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
