By Johnny Edward:
Nigerian athlete Seye Ogunlewe finished fourth in the men’s 100m final of the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games in Australia on Monday, reports Completesportsnigeria.com.
Ogunlewe recorded a personal season’s best time of 10.19 seconds in a photo finish with Jamaican athlete, Yohan Blake, who was given third place and the bronze medal.
The other Nigerian in the final, Enoch Adegoke, finished seventh with a time of 10.35 seconds.
Akani Simbine from South Africa won the 100m gold with a time of 10.03 seconds while his compatriot Henricho Bruintjies won silver with a time of 10.17 seconds.
In the shot put event, Chukwuebuka Enekwechi won silver for Nigeria, setting a new personal best.
Enekwechi threw a distance of 21.14m to clinch second place.
New Zealand’s Tomas Walsh won gold in the event, setting a new games record. Walsh recorded a distance of 21.41m. Tim Nedow from Canada came third with a distance from 20.19 which was his season’s best.
Nigeria’s Eke Kalu finished 12th in the finals with a throw of 17.86m.
COMMENTS
Adegoke and Ogunlewe!! Refreshing Champions of the Future! But will Nigeria manage them well? The boys surprised me, and I salute them..
When did SA start beating Nigeria in the 100m sprint, whether men or women’s event? The last time, it was CIV, then Ghana, then Cameroun. This used to be Nigeria’s turf, at least in Africa, while SA dominate swimming, and Kenya and Ethiopa, long distance races. Even in boxing, Ghana has been knocking Nigeria out of the podium for some years now.
Amadi you can say that again, athletics is an amateur sports unlike football, so every nation’s sports programme determines the qaulities of the athletes they produce, at the london 2012 olympics, I saw so many young athletes reaching the semis and finals of their events, if we have good sports programmes by now they will be stars, we use to send our athletes to US universities on scholarship in the 80s and 90s and there were regular competitions to discover new ones and then offer them scholarship in american universities but we have abandoned those programmes, all we do now is wait for the athlete’s families or philantropists to nurture them to stardom, then we start sending them to competition with little or no incentives, when they get injured or lose form we abandon them, when they bounce back we remember them, when they become frustrated along with new ones who have seen their experience refuse to represent us or demand for their full entitlement, we termed them unpatriotic, when those born abroad see these things they reject us claiming they feel more like the citizens of the country of their birth than ours.
The rot in the sporting life of the nation is what is manifesting. Let’s hope the other association will tow the line of NFF and make the revolutionary changes to stop the rot.
I am not one of those that criticize officials for “eating” money and will never be. Rather, what I am against is “eating” without working.