BY CHRISTIAN EZE
THE 2025 Confederation of African Athletics {CAA} 3rd Under- 18 and Under- 20 athletics Championship will kick-off tomorrow at Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital in South West Nigeria with about 937 athletes and officials.
The umbrella body of all sports matters in Nigeria, the National Sports Commission (NSC) and the body that has the direct and immediate administrative responsibility with all athletics affairs in the country, Athletic Federation of Nigeria {AFN} have done all that are needed to ensure a hitch-free athletics meet in the championship.
A total of 43 African countries are reported to be participating in this year’s championship, prominent among who are: Egypt, Kenya, Ethiopia, Morocco and Ghana. Others are Senegal, Algeria Uganda and the host nation, Nigeria.
These participating nations have expressed strong interest in making the event worthy of its rating as they hope to do exceedingly well and to further break existing records in key athletics events to show some pronounced level 0f improvements in the continent.
Nigeria the host nation has one hundred and thirty seven {137} athletes and officials comprising sixty and fifty male and female athletes respectively as well as additional twenty two officials listed for the championship and are willing to secure the leadership position as first among equals. This dream will if actualized, will automatically dethrone South Africa from their first position in the last edition.
South Africa has a hundred athletes and officials in their registered number of participants comprising forty two and fort male and female athletes and eighteen officials.
Other countries that have reasonable number of participants are Ethiopia with sixty nine registered persons; Kenya has sixty seven athletes and officials while Algeria has sixty five.
The two bodies primarily concerned with the smooth running of the activities within the period, NSC and AFN are fully prepared with all the facilities properly arranged for the championship and every African athlete within the age brackets would have reason to rejoice for taken part.
The beauty of the setting is the enthusiasm observed so far among the administrators with synergy between the NSC President, Hon Shehu Dikko and the Director General (DG) Chief Bukola Olakpade working in conjunction with the AFN President, Chief Tonobok Okowa and his other members and workers as there is no vacuum observed in the provision of both material and human resources but absolute resourcefulness in the system.
Athletics events are always in two categories broadly spelt out as filed and track events and both are easily spelt out from their names.
The field events are done in the field like has been aptly notated, some of them are High Jump and other jump events, Javelin, Shot-put, Discuss, etc. wile track events centers on events that are done on tracks like 100m race, 200m 1500m 5000km and even 10,000km.
All these events will be witnessed in this CAA encounter.
