Nigeria will not partake in the football competition at 2020 Olympics In Tokyo after Super Falcons were knocked out on away goal rule by the Female Elephants of Ivory Coast and the Olympic Eagles crashed out of the U-23 AFCON going on in Egypt.
Nigeria male football team will miss out from the Olympics for the third time with earlier miss outs coming in 2004 and 2012 while the Super Falcons will miss out for a third consecutive time.
Nigeria’s sole medal at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil came from football with the Samson Sisia led team winning what Nigerian sports fans tagged ‘golden bronze’ and with zero medals won in 2012 when the football teams did not qualify, the future does not certainly look bright.
Over the years, the performance at the Olympics have been poor, with the athletes not getting the right preparation towards an important event which eventually leads to poor outing for the athletes.
Judging from what happened at the IAAF last month, it is easy to say the country might stand no chance at the Olympics. At the world championships, Nigeria’s only medal was another ‘golden bronze ‘ which came from Ese Brume at the Long Jump events. With so much mis-management that led to Divine Oduduru and Blessing Okagbare disqualified at the events, there are no realistic chances that things will change in Tokyo.
Despite making and breaking records at the 2019 All African Games where the team finished second on the medals table with 46 gold medals and a total of 127 medals, team Nigeria have not replicated such performance outside the country.
Team Nigeria in 16 Olympics outings have won a total of 25 medals which includes 3 gold medals, 10 silver and 12 bronze medals.
With football outrightly out of the way, Nigeria will hope that her athletes can pull up surprises at the Olympics next year for a realistic chance to win a medal.
