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By Monica Iheakam
Team Nigeria men and women’s 4x400m relay teams will be in a race against time as they have till the end of July to earn their ticket to the World Championship in Budapest in August.
The teams one Saturday inched closer to qualifying for the next month’s event with impressive performances at the CAA Region II Senior Athletics Championships, which ended Saturday in Lome, Togo.
The men’s quartet of Dubem Nwachukwu, Nathaniel Ezekiel, Ogazi Samuel and Chidi Okezie ran a seasons’ best of 3:02.91 the fastest a Nigerian men’s 4x400m team has run since July 2012 to move up to 18th in the qualification ranking.
For the women’s, the 4x400m quartet of Imaobong Nse Uko, Patience Okon-George, Queen Osunbor and Omolara Ogunmakinju ran 3:29.09 to move just outside the last team in the qualification spot.
The time is also not just the team’s season’s best but also the fastest ran by a Nigerian women’s 4x400m relay team since the quartet of Patience Okon George, Glory Onome Nathaniel, Praise Idamadudu and Yinka Ajayi ran 3:25.29 to place second at the 2018 Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast, Australia.
Team Nigeria is now 17th in the ranking and will need to run faster than the 3:28.79 Botswana ran last month at the Kenyan championships which has now placed them 16th.
