The National Athletic championship on going in Benin, Edo state, Nigeria entered day 3 after two days of intriguing athletic action at the Samuel Ogbemudia stadium.
The biggest result of day 2 will be Favour Ashe’s 100m win. Ahse saw off the challenge of Alaba Akintola to win the men’s National title, racing to a new lifetime’s best of 9.99s.
The Nigerian nightmare as he is fondly called has become the second man to run a sub 10s in Nigeria, only behind his former coach Deji Aliu.
Ashe who had earlier boasted saying “I am going to run a 9…?” has now become the 12th Nigerian athlete in history to run sub 10s, joining an elite group.
Defending champion, Enoch Adegoke could not race in the men’s 100m after getting injured in the heats yesterday while Raymond Ekevwo missed out after not warming up all through.
Earlier, Grace Nwokocha became Nigeria’s new women 100m champion after she held off the challenge of Rosemary Chukwuma, in a time of 11.02s.
Abejoye Oyeniyi retaines his national title in a hard way after he came through the middle with Alex Al-Ameen and Prosper Ekporere shadowing him to get to the line quicker than all in 13.78s.
Nigeria’s most inform athlete at the moment, Tobi Amusan was also in action as she won the 100m hurdles in a time of 12.54s. Although she was not too impressed with the time as she had ran a national best at the Diamond League some days ago in 12.41s.
Samson Nathaniel will be the hot man to claim the title in men’s 400m after running the fastest time overall to win heat 2 in 45.98s. Adeyemi Sikiru is also in good form, winning heat 4 in 46.07s, while Chidera Johnson 46.34s and Emma Ojeli 47.14s go through as automatic qualifiers.
In men’s triple jump, Chidozie Kalu got just 2 valid jumps out of a six-jump series which were his first 2 attempts, but was enough to secure the title.
Kalu marginally improved on his previous personal best of 16.06m, leaping a new personal best of 16.07m to win the title.
In high jump, Esther Isa and Temitope Adeshina who jumped her personal best at 1.88m to share the title.
National record holder, Ruth Usoro won her first ever national title, leaping a season’s best of 14.11m to win the women’s Triple Jump at the 2022. Usoro’s best mark coming to the championships was 13.95m.
After an entertaining two days, all is now set for day 3 as the finals of 200m (men/women), javelin (men), 1500m (men/woman) and lots more events awaits us in Benin.
The national champions will be the country’s flag bearers at the World championship in Oregon, United States.
