8) Temitope Adeshina
In future, one gripping story Temitope Adeshina will tell her children by moonlight, is how she went straight from the Airport to the Cote D’or Sports complex to represent Nigeria, and left the stadium with a Silver medal. Interestingly, it is not going to be a fairytale but a non-fiction event.
This season was the year Adeshina finally broke loose from the shadows of her friend and rival, Esther Isah, whom she had been playing second fiddle to in the High Jump event for the past three years. However, Adeshina started charting her own course this season.
Surprisingly, Adeshina had never made a Nigerian team before this year, not even in the Junior category. This year, she went straight into the senior team and twice made the national team for two major championships.
Having battled for a long time to eclipse her PB of 1.75m, it was some sort of relief for Adeshina in 2019 when she jumped her then PB of 1.80m to finish 2nd at the Nigerian Trials in Kaduna. It took her another two seasons to find the 1.8m range, and when she did, it was to win the National Sports Festival title in Benin, jumping 1.80m.
Question: "so who won in the women's High Jump?" Esther Isa & Temitope Adeshina (PB) replying: "remember what happened at the Olympics (Tokyo), that's the outcome." That's right, both athletes jumped 1.88m and shared the GOLD, because they had a similar sequence #NigerianChamps pic.twitter.com/ggyLMdnKsY
— Making of Champions (@MakingOfChamps) June 25, 2022
2022 was the year it all clicked for Adeshina, travelling out of Nigeria for the first time, but it wasn’t without a tinge of some drama. Some uncoordinated travel arrangements led to her not arriving with the first batch of Nigerian athletes to Port Louis for the African Senior Championships.
It was quite a sight seeing Adeshina race down the track to sort out her registration, having just arrived from Lagos, and still jetlagged. In fact, she was quite hungry because she had been travelling for more than 24hrs, connecting Nairobi from Lagos and then Mauritius.
There was no time to eat or freshen up, as she practically arrived the stadium just 15mins before her event. What’s remarkable was how she composed herself to go on and finish on the podium, clinching the Silver medal. When she tells her kids the story, surely there will be a more personal touch to it, and they will get to know if she feared that she would miss her event.
The tale of Mauritius no doubt made Adeshina stronger, because some weeks later at the Nigerian Trials, she came very close to beating her friend, Isa, for the first time in her career. The outcome of that event was reminiscent of what transpired in the men’s High Jump at the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Borrowing a leaf from Gianmarco Tamberi and Mutaz Barshim, both ladies opted not to continue jumping, as they both had an identical sequence, en route jumping 1.88m. Both athletes shared the GOLD medal, but for Adeshina, it was a new PB of 1.88m. She reached a new height she had never scaled before.
This season, she competed in her first Commonwealth Games for Nigeria and made the final in Birmingham. She jumped 1.81m to finish 10th overall, an encouraging outing for someone who had not competed at that level before.
One thing she has always been grateful for, is her parents who have always been very supportive and believed that her time would come, even when she had doubts. Her time has come, and it could be for a while. Certainly, it will be one of the things she would tell her children.
