Nigeria’s first Olympics medalist, Nojim Maiyegun is dead.
Glamtush reports that Nojim Maiyegun, Nigeria’s pioneering Olympic medalist, has died at the age of 84.
Maiyegun made history by winning a bronze medal in light-heavyweight boxing at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a feat that earned him a place in the country’s sporting hall of fame.
According to a Facebook post by his acquaintance, Rudolfine Soultan, Maiyegun died after a long illness.
Soultan described Maiyegun’s death as “horrible” and revealed that they would have marked their 17th anniversary together in two days.
“My Jimmy died. I can’t say more about this right now because it’s just horrible. The day after tomorrow, we would have been together for 17 years,” Soultan wrote.
Maiyegun, who won Nigeria’s first-ever Olympics medal, is believed to have passed away today in his Vienna, Austria base.
The medalist who became visually impaired a few years ago, had reportedly been battling an unnamed illness for months before his death.
He won a bronze medal in the light-heavyweight boxing category at the Tokyo 1964 Olympics to break Nigeria’s medal jinx.
Two years later, he won another bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica.
Maiyegun left Nigeria in 1971 to begin a professional boxing career, fighting 16 times and winning 12, 10 of them by knockout.
Maiyegun’s remarkable achievement in Tokyo and his subsequent bronze medal at the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica, inspired generations of Nigerian athletes.
