By Victor Kanayo
No Nigerian boxer will be on parade during the 2024 Olympic Games after they failed to qualify in both the male and female categories, scheduled for Paris, France.
This is the second time that Nigeria will fail to send boxers to the Olympics since the nation began participating in the Games in 1952, except the 1976 Summer Olympics which was boycotted.
Nigeria also failed to send any boxer to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, also over failure to qualify a single boxer for the Games.
Nigeria’s Olympics Performance In Boxing
Nigerian athletes have managed to win a total of 27 medals, mostly in athletics and boxing against all odds.
Since 1951 when the Nigeria Olympics Committee was established, the country persisted without winning a single Olympics medal until the 1964 version of the Games in Tokyo, Japan, when Nojim Maiyegun won the bronze medal in the Men’s light middleweight category.
Eight years on, another boxer-Isaac Ikhouria- won for Nigeria, her second Olympics medal when he beat out another bronze medal in the Men’s light heavyweight class of the 1972 Munich Games.
Nigeria suffered a 20-year lapse on the medal rostrum before Peter Konyegwachie, another boxer came to the rescue by winning Nigeria’s first Olympics silver medal through his sensational effort in the Men’s featherweight event at the Los Angeles Games in 1984.
Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) is currently organising a National trials for track and field, long and high jump athletes.
