Athletics Africa Magazine

A friend of mine said last week that 'God is a Nigerian'. Well, I'm tempted to believed him now as Nigeria has miraculously found her way into the women's 4x100m relay event at the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, China, even after all reasonable hopes were lost. When the relay teams to the Games of XXIX Olympiad, Beijing 2008, were announced by the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) on Monday 21 July, Nigeria was in 18th position in the women’s 4 x100m qualification standings. However, today one qualified nation , Finland pulled out and Nigeria moved up to the 16th - Cuba (originally 16th) had earlier declined their invitation for the women’s 4 x100m and was replaced by Thailand, originally 17th - and final placing and will now compete in Beijing. Last week, Nigeria's last ditched and ill advised efforts at muscling the International Olympics Committee (IOC) to field a women's 4x100m team in Beijing was thrown out after the IAAF argued that the...

World Indoor 60m Champion Olusoji Fasuba speaks to AthleticsAfrica.com on his Olympic preparations in Abuja, July, 2008.

Obinna Metu beats World Indoor 60m Champion Olusoji Fasuba in the 100m men's race at the 19th NNPC/Exxon Mobil Nigeria Olympics Trials in Abuja, June 2008.

By now it's no longer news that the best athlete in Britain would not be going to the Olympics. I have followed the events of the past few months with regards to Dwain Chambers closely and crawled so many sites/forums to sample opinions about this case, and as divided as these opinions have been, one thing that struck me is the level of hypocrisy i see. From the sad and lamentable actions of the British Olympic Association and UK Athletics, the sorry utterrances of it's leading officials and the gang-up of some disaffected former athletes and their cronies in the media , it all smacks of a society of people eager to bury their own shame at the expense of a scapegoat. To me Chambers is not being punished for taking drugs in the past , he is being punished now for daring to stand up to the establishment and for being honest to call a spade a spade. As a consequence, he's been bullied, pilloried and abused by the ''holier and morally upright' lynch-mob. Liste...