Good news from Paris. Nigerian sprinter, Favour Ofili, Monday, secured a berth in the final of the women’s 200m event at the ongoing Olympic Games.
She finished second with a season’s best time of 22.05seconds behind Julien Alfred of Saint Lucia, who won the first semi-final race with a time of 21.98s also on Monday.
Alfred has already made history with the gold medal she won in the 100 metres event, setting a new national record of 10.72s. The gold medal is the first-ever Olympic medal for Saint Lucia, a tiny island country of the West Indies in the eastern Caribbean with a population of 180,251 people (2023 estimate).
With her qualification for the final, Ofili has also penned her name in Nigeria’s sports history as the second Nigerian, after Mary Onyali, to qualify for the 200m final, at the Olympics.
| Onyali won bronze in the 200 metres event at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. She remains the only Nigerian to have made it to the podium in the event. | ||
In the men’s race, Udodi Onwuzurike will get a second chance to become the fourth Nigerian man to reach the semifinals of the 200m at the Olympics.
Before Monday’s historic race, Favour Ofili had been in the news, hitting the headlines when the Nigeria Olympic Committee, NOC, left her name off the entry list for the women’s 100m at Paris 2024.
The 21-year-old sprinter had expected to compete in three events at her first Olympics ever: the 100m, 200m and women’s 4x100m relay respectively. And she was told just before last Friday’s heats that she had not been registered for the 100m.
She was dazed by the development and quickly took to social media with a blistering statement, declaring: “I have worked for four years to earn this opportunity. For what?”
The development stoked a fire of confusion in Team Nigeria’s camp, as well as among sport buffs back home, with many Nigerians wondering how that could happen. Both NOC officials and the governing body, World Athletics, compounded the already bad situation, denying responsibility.
“We are trying to get to the root of it, because she qualified in our trials and the result was sent to World Athletics,” Solomon Ogba, a vice president of the Nigeria Olympic Committee, told BBC Sport Africa in Paris.
“We just confirmed that. Normally, World Athletics will send [entries] for Paris 2024. That is where the confusion is.”
However, World Athletics, the organisation responsible for drawing up start lists, confirmed to BBC Sport Africa that Ofili was only entered in two events – the 200m and the women’s 4x100m relay.
Nigeria’s Sports Minister, Senator John Owan Enoh, has promised to probe the embarrassing saga, and that there will be “thorough sanctions” for those found culpable for the unpardonable oversight.
