By Victor Kanayo
Few days after two female Nigerian athletes – Tobi Amusan and Ese Brume were rated high globally, another set of athletes from same country have ranked tops.
Among them is shot put sensation Chukuwebuka Enekwechi who is now ranked among the best athletes in his event by the World Athletics.
World Athletics has undertaken to create a global ranking system where athletes score points based on a combination of result and place depending on the level of the competition in which the result is achieved.
According to the ranking series, Enekwechi the reigning African champion in Shot Put is ranked 14th in the world with an accumulated score of 1293.
The 2018 Commonwealth Games Silver medalist is the only African athlete among the top 20 rankings and is distantly followed by Mohamed Hamza from Egypt ranked 24th with a score of 1227.
Also, reigning Nigeria 100m king, Favour Ashe, tops the list of four Nigerian sprinters that made the top 100 ranking list in the blue riband event.
The 20-year-old who has just transferred from University of Tennessee to Auburn University in the United States of America is ranked the 26th best 100m runner so far this year.
The other three Nigerians listed in the ranking are Raymond Ekevwo (31), Ushoritse Ishekiri (61) and Alaba Akintola (64).
New Nigerian record holders in the 400m hurdles (Nathaniel Ezekiel) and Javelin (Nnamdi Chinacherem Prosper) also made it to the top 100 list of ranked athletes in their respective events.
The ranking is then based on their average score over a certain number of competitions in a defined period of time.
In any calendar year, World Athletics processes more than 1,000,000 results from more than 10,000 competitions worldwide which feed into the world rankings.
