Enterprising field athlete, Nadia Eke has come out wtih an explanation of the reasons behind her decision to snub the opportunity of representing Nigeria at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, as she opted instead to don the colours of Ghana.
Megasportsarena.com reports that Eke’s father is a Nigerian and her mother is from Ghana, but she has now revealed why she did not hesitate in making her choice of the country she wanted to represent as a triple jumper.
The talented athlete, who loves the music of Ghanaian pop singer, Shatta Wale, chose Ghana, which she is now representing at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
She shot into the global spotlight in 2014, when she finished tenth at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, after winning silver at the African Championships in Marrakech, Morocco and was seventh at the IAAF Continental Cup.
Eke, who also featured at the IAAF World Challenge Meeting Madrid in 2017, also won bronze at the African Games in Brazzaville, Congo in 2015 and became African champion the following year, after which she qualified for the 2020 Summer Olympics’ women’s triple jump event.
The inspirational athlete, who graduated from Columbia University, USA in 2015 has an outdoor personal best of 14.33m that is also a Ghanaian record and was enacted at an event in Jamaica in June 2019, while her indoor best is 13.60m, which she achieved on January 14, 2017 in New York.
The 2015 graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology was a four-year member of The Lions’ indoor and outdoor track and field teams, with which she earned All-America honors four times and was named a CoSIDA Academic All-American as a senior.
The two-time All American and Ivy League NCAA Woman of the Year is also co-founder of Axxelerate, a company that seeks to help athletes develop their aspirations beyond their sport.
She is also in her first season as an assistant coach of New York University track and field teams, for which her primary responsibility is working with the jumpers.
A 10-time Ivy League Heptagonal Champion in the long and triple jumps, served as an assistant coach at her alma mater during the 20-15-16 season and helped one of her triple jumpers earn her first Ivy League title and a preliminary qualification to the NCAA Championships.
The 28-year-old native of Accra, Ghana, who won the 2016 IAAF African Athletics Championship and now resides in Manhattan, USA, disclosed that she chose Ghana because of originality, since she was born in the Anglophone West African country that was previously known as Gold Coast.
Eke told BBC Sport: “I chose to compete for Ghana in 2014 because being Ghanaian is my blood. It’s authentically who I am and so for me to be selected as the flag bearer was a testament to all of the things that I’ve been through, everything thing that I stand for in that moment, to be that person that is representing Ghana.
“I am Nigerian and I’m Ghanaian and so if anyone has the best answer is me. My mother is Ghanaian and my father is Nigerian. I asked my father this myself. ‘I said which country has the best jollof? And he said; ‘I ended up marrying a Ghanaian woman.’”
