Progress for Nigerian University Sports

NIGERIA – The Nigerian Taekwondo team that attended the recent concluded African Taekwondo championship in Port Said, Egypt had in its ranks two athletes who were at the 28^th Universiade in Gwangju, Korea last summer representing Team Nigeria.

Santos Akhilele, a 4th year Economics and statistics student at the University of Benin and Chinazum Nwosu, a student of Biology at the University of Portharcourt, both Nigerian universities, were part of a successful Nigerian team at the African Taekwondo championship, both are national champions in feather (-68kg) and Bantam (-58kg) respectively.

The 2 day event held lots of promise for these athletes who were participating for the first time, Santos Akhilele showed lots of promise though he lost out in the quarter finals to eventual gold medalist Ghofran Zaki of Egypt. Chinazum Nwosu went a step further into the semi’s but lost to the African champion Radwa Abdelkader but she went ahead to claim the bronze medal at the third place match.

“It was a great experience really, working with professionals who have been doing this for years and going past some of them, we are working towards the world championship in Mutu Korea and also the Universiade in Taipei next year”, the athletes claimed on their return.

This is an extensive improvement not just for the Nigerian Taekwondo federation but for university sports in the country as they are finally getting the desired recognition. The permutation is that these two athletes will only be the first out of many to make that big step up to the bigger stages in the coming months as other competitions will be coming up before the year runs out. We now draw our focus to the upcoming African university games to be held in Johannesburg in July this year.

Chidiebere Ezeani, U-Media Reporter NGR