8 May 2008
Lagos — The newly introduced National Sports Commission (NSC) Relays will have additional events when Calabar hosts the show this Saturday at the U.J Esuene Stadium, Calabar.
Maria Woophil, the scribe of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) said yesterday that apart from the relays athletes will also compete in the sprints and the quarter mile. The new sprint events are the 100m and 200m.
"Since this is a developmental programme and all the athletes who do the relays do the flats, we thought it will be nice to add them at the Calabar event," she said on arrival from Ethiopia where Nigeria competed in the African Athletics Championships. South Africa was the overall winner while Nigeria placed second.
The relays were introduced last month as a development programme but it was also hoped that athletes preparing for the Beijing Olympics would use them to practice and get used to themselves.
Relays remain Nigeria's brightest medal prospects at the Olympics and the disqualification of the Nigerian 4x100m men relay in Ethiopia following faulty baton exchange appears to justify the introduction of the relays.
All members of the team in Ethiopia did not compete in the first relay meet which took place in Abuja on April 26th.
But Maria said yesterday that the Calabar meet will also be richer in that the team Nigeria presented in Ethiopia will run as a team at this second leg of the relays..
"We did not drop the baton in Ethiopia. One of our runners ran past the exchange area before taking the baton and that denied us the medal in Ethiopia. We hope to get it right during the relays and I am happy everybody will be in Calabar," Woophill said.
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