Finding Abuja's heroine

The Athletics competitions of the AllAfrican Games in Abuja, Nigeria, will take place during the final week of that multi-sport festival (14 to 18 October). As a precursor to our coverage of those events Tunde Oyedoyin, the London Correspondent of the Guardian Newspaper of Nigeria follows a recent trend in international championships, and asks who will be the heroine of Abuja?

Having witnessed the two major IAAF World Championships this year, one cannot pretend not to have noticed a new order emerging in athletics - women have taken over the driving seat. You couldn’t write the scripts of either the World Indoor Championships in Birmingham - last March - or the recently concluded World Championships in Athletics, Paris 2003 Saint-Denis, without the names of two gold medallists, Ashia Hansen (Triple Jump) and Eunice Barber (Long Jump).

Albeit that last month Paul Tergat became the first man to run the marathon in under 2 hours five minutes, it has been heroines that have suddenly taken over the centre stage of Athletics. The Paula Radcliffes and Yuliya Pechonkinas of this world have been  the ones making the front covers of newspapers. In general it is the women who are now assaulting the performance barriers.

In a similar way both Hansen and Barber exemplified that women’s athletics was at the forefront of our sport’s headlines, coming to the rescue just when individual gold seemed set to elude the host nation in both Birmingham and Paris. The twist and turn of their fortunes in the jumping arena became the hallmark of these two global competitions.

Interestingly, both girls are natives of Africa. Barber, the French World Long Jump champion, was originally from Sierra-Leone before naturalisation, while Hansen, the British World Indoor Triple Jump champion, while USA born has Ghanaian blood flowing through her veins.

Yet what makes them the subject of this article is not their African origin, but the ability of both athletes to rise to the highest heaven, as demonstrated inside the Birmingham’s National Indoor Arena, and the Stade de France in Paris, respectively.

In the former stadium, the Cameroonian triple jumper, Francois Mbango jumping last, set a new African record with a commanding jump of 14.88m in the first round to neutralise the opening 14.77m mark of Hansen.

Yes, any Cameroonian would have thought at the time that this looked set to be the day of vengeance for her defeat at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester by Hansen.

However, Hansen - who also holds the World Indoor triple jump record turned the tables in the fifth round with a huge leap of 15.01m - the sixth occasion that the 15m barrier had been broken in the history of the Indoor triple jump. The damage had been done, Mbango took her fifth round jump, but couldn't catch up, the sixth round effort was also an effort in futility. Great Britain had taken the gold, their first during the championships.

On the eve of the World Indoors, I'd asked Mbango how she felt about what had happened in Manchester the previous year and she told me she couldn't explain it - nevertheless, "I'm happy for Ashia." The expression on the face of the African record holder at the Copthorne Hotel in Birmingham was similar to the one she had exhibited when Hansen produced her winning jump the previous summer.

Enter Eunice Barber, the jumping queen of Paris 2003. Having claimed a silver medal for the host nation in the Heptathlon on the second day, ordinarily, nobody would have criticised her if she had fallen flat in her second event the Long Jump but what turns mortal women to heroines is the ability to dig deep and produce the effort which will eventually make you the darling of tens of thousands of hearts.

Barber knows how to deliver when it matters most, she is a big time performer without question, and the French nation will never forget her, neither will the Russian jumper, Tatyana Kotova!

Barber, it was, who won the first and only individual gold medal for the host nation and consequentially brought the home crowd at the Stade de France to ecstasy with her seasonal best of 6.94m, rubbishing the Russian’s 6.74m that would otherwise have been good enough for gold.

The 70,000 French crowd had each day looked desperately for that moment when their national anthem would be the one being rendered at the medal presentation ceremony. With two days remaining, the prospects had looked dim.

But up stepped Barber. Kotova had appeared secure in gold but there was one chance left and the crowd waited anxiously for a 50 per cent fit Barber to take her final attempt, and this is where the story got interesting. This is where those athletes with the big hearts come off age. The pride of a host nation was at stake, their emotions also.

Off she went on her run up: one, two, three…and by the 16th step, when she took her leap of faith she crossed to the realm of Athletics immortality. Give that performance to any motivational or evangelical speaker and what you would get is a masterclass on: "The 16 steps To Winning." One could feel for Kotova as she left Paris in tears, this wasn't a case of Jacob supplanting an Esau, but simply a ‘Leap Of Faith’, a ‘Leap of Fury’ or perhaps a ‘Leap to Destiny’.

In what was now becoming a two way battle, Barber handed another defeat to Tatyana in Monaco-two weeks-later during the inaugural World Athletics Final at the Stade Louis II 

The question for Nigeria is, who will be the ‘Hansen’ or ‘Barber’ for them in Abuja? It is an ability or quality which the host nation of the All African Games with her leasehold on the hosting rights of this multi-sport festival - which began on 4th October - already diminishing, will hope that at least one of its track and field athletes will find they possess when the Athletics gets under way on 14 October.

Anyone - not necessarily just the Nigerian women alone - who can turn silver to gold can surely become another Eunice Barber or Ashia Hansen. If anyone is  capable of causing upset with just 10 metres to go in the 100m or in any other event, the Abuja crowd will be loud in appreciation, the atmosphere will be electrifying. So let us hope that some hitherto mortal athletes break that thin line that leads to immortality between 14th and 18th October.