Two out of the seven countries confirmed for the invitational relays scheduled as part of Nigeria’s Olympics trials have arrived in Lagos for the event.
The two countries, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire came in Wednesday while the other five countries, including Zambia, Botswana, Cameroun, Benin Republic and Ghana are expected to jet in today.
The competition, holding at the Sports Ground of the Yaba College of Technology, is one of the windows Nigeria and other African countries have to ensure their relay teams qualify for the relay events of the Tokyo Olympics following the cancellation of the African Senior Championships earlier billed to hold at the Teslim Balogun stadium in Lagos.
Nigeria has provisionally qualified for the women’s 4x100m event and will be hoping to seal their spot-on home soil with the iconic sprinter, Blessing Okagbare leading the charge.
The men’s 4x100m and the women’s 4x400m relay teams are just one quality performance away from sealing their places in Team Nigeria’s flight to the quadrennial Games.
The men’s 4x100m team has slipped one step further down to 18th in the ranking of teams for the games following Turkey and Ukraine’s impressive performance at an athletics meeting on June 12 in Erzurum, Turkey.
While Turkey jumped from 16th to 15th after their quartet improved from 38.47 seconds to 38.20 seconds, Ukraine jumped above Nigeria to 17th after running 38.51 seconds at the same event.
Nigeria is ranked 18th courtesy of the 38.59 seconds the team ran two years ago at the African Games in Rabat and will need to run under 38.15 seconds to be sure of picking one of the available four slots on offer.
