Team Nigeria have secured one more qualification spot for the relays event of the 2023 World Athletics Championships, which holds from August 19 to 27 in Budapest, Hungary, after a mixed outing at the grand finale of the Deji Tinubu/Lagos Club Athletics Series on Friday.
Out of three relay quartets that targeted qualifying times at the event, only the women’s 4x400m made their mark, while their male counterparts and the men’s 4x100m fell short.
Nigeria’s quartet Omolara Omotosho, Patience Okon-George, Ella Onojuvwevwo and Imabong Uko ran a season’s best of 32:27:61secs to move up to 14th and punch their ticket to the World Championships.
Dubem Nwachukwu, Ezekiel Nathaniel, Samuel Ogazi and Chidi Okezie came very close to making top 16 of the men’s 4x400m, posting another season’s best of 3:02.64secs but it was only good enough to rank them 17th in the world.
The men’s 4x100m team of Favour Ashe, Usheoritse Itsekiri, Alaba Akintola and Godson Brume could not also make the qualifying mark after running 38.65secs in the final of their event.
The time is better than the 38.73secs they produced at the African Region 2 relay events in Lome, Togo last Saturday but are still 18th in the classification, needing to improve their time to be among the 16 countries that will participate in the event in Budapest.
The remaining two quartets will keep aiming to run faster than 38.50secs before the July 29 deadline set by World Athletics.
Punch
