Nigeria’s sports minister, Sunday Akinlabi Dare is singing praises to the country’s contingent to the just concluded World U-20 Athletics Championship in Nairobi, Kenya, as they pulled off the nation’s best ever outing at this level.
With four gold medals and three bronze in the kitty, Team Nigeria placed third on the final medals’ table, much to the delight of Dare, who hailed the athletes for their record breaking performance, which he says returned the nation to global reckoning in track and field.
Megasportsarena.com reports that, in the wake of the heroics in Nairobi, Dare thanked President Muhammadu Buhari for motivating the success and promised the team will be kept together so that they can end up as Olympic Games medalists.
He gave details of the medals’ surge achieved in Nairobi by Team Nigeria, which was, for the first time in the global youth championship’s history, represented in all the relay events.
Dare submitted: “I want to specially congratulate the athletes and their coaches for achieving our best ever performance in the history of the Championships
”These young athletes deserve our respect for representing Nigeria so very well. Congratulations to our young athletes on their record breaking performance at the World U20 Athletics Championships in Nairobi, Kenya.
“Through their excellent performances Nigeria earned a third place on the medals table out of 114 countries that participated.
“This third position places Nigeria on the world map of the world athletics and signposts a new trajectory for Athletics in Nigeria.
“At the World Athletics U20 level, the last time we won a gold medal was in 2008. For 13 long years we have struggled to win another gold.
“Now we have won not one but four, the most in one edition and have an unprecedented seven medals to make the Nairobi 2021 Championships truly our best ever performance.
“The duo of Imaobong Nse Uko (400m) and Udodi Onwuzurike (200m) won individual gold medals while the 4x400m mixed and the women’s relay teams also won our first ever relay gold medals at the Championships.
“We started by rewriting our bad record at the Olympics since 2008 by not only winning two medals but also getting as many as five athletes in the finals of their events.
“It was a clear departure from what we had at the 2012 (London) and 2016 (Rio De Janeiro) Olympics where we won just a medal and produced just two individual medalists in two Olympics.
“We will keep this team, and train them. We will design a programme for them and have them prepared for more victories. We have started building a new and younger generation of Nigerian Athletes.
“There is much hope. We thank President Muhammadu Buhari for his continuous support for sports developments in Nigeria. This is truly a new beginning for sports in Nigeria.”
FINAL MEDALS’ TABLE
COUNTRY G S B Tot
Kenya 8 1 7 16
Finland 4 1 0 5
Nigeria 4 0 3 7
Ethiopia 3 7 2 12
Jamaica 3 6 2 11
S/Africa 3 2 4 9
Botswana 3 1 0 4
Sweden 3 0 0 3
France 2 4 2 8
Czech R. 2 0 1 3
Namibia 1 3 0 4
Belarus 1 1 3 5
Mexico 1 1 0 2
Turkey 1 1 0 2
Cuba 1 0 2 3
Israel 1 0 0 1
Lithuania 1 0 0 1
Serbia 1 0 0 1
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