1) Tobi Amusan
Don’t get tired of seeing Tobi Amusan at the apex of our end-of-the-year Toplists. What she was able to achieve in 2022 is unprecedented, but most importantly, her epochal achievement in Eugene is singlehandedly the biggest Nigerian sporting moment in 2022! There’s no other sporting moment that holds a candle to Tobi running a World Record (WR).
Maybe if the Super Eagles had qualified for the World Cup in Qatar, then there would have been a strong debate on what Nigeria’s best Sports moment in 2022 was. One person gained the attention of the whole country and transformed the image of Athletics in Nigeria.
For the first time in history, Nigeria did not just get its first Track and Field World champion but also a cherry of having a WR holder. What better PR to attract new fans to the sport than having a world champion.
Prior to the World Championships, Tobi had bettered her African Record by one-hundredth of a second, running a new one of 12.41s in Paris, and then ran a new Championship Record of 12.65s to win the women’s 100m Hurdles at the Nigerian Trials. She was in a good form, but not World Record level…or so we thought.
Yes, records are good, but all Nigerian fans wanted from Amusan was for her to exorcise the demons of the World Championships in 2019 and Tokyo 2020 Olympics where she agonizingly missed out on the podium, finishing 4th on both occasions.
If Amusan was starting her World Championships with a new African Record of 12.40s to win her heat, it inspired hope for a potential medal, but then she blew our minds away in the semifinals, running a race for the ages by storming to a never-seen-before 12.12s in the Women’s 100m Hurdles.
It took Kendra Harrison 27 years to surpass Yordanko Donkova’s record, and when she ran 12.20s six years ago in London, it looked like no one would go sub 12.20s in the women’s 100m Hurdles for a long time; it was alien territory.
Which explains why Tobi Amusan was stunned at seeing that she had posted a WR time in the semifinal, and even though she had been speaking it into existence, there was still a flicker of doubt as to her ability to pull it off.
Running a wind-aided 12.06s (+2.5) to win GOLD in the final was all the confirmation needed to show that Tobi’s semifinal 12.12s was not an error. A nation had be enthralled and held spell bound by Tobi’s masterpiece; for the first time, they had a world champion, even though most of the new fans were just getting a grasp of the sport.
They may not have understood what a wind reading was, but they were willing to learn, and now a lot of Nigerians look forward to when Tobi will be running at any meet.
She was organically trending on social media platforms: from being honoured by President Muhammadu Buhari with an OON national award, to winning back-to-back Commonwealth Games titles, then her second Diamond League trophy, visiting her alma-mater and being nominated for Athlete of the Year award, Tobi Amusan easily shoots up the trend-table whenever there’s any news about her.
She had become a national icon, bringing Athletics to the front burner and drawing people to the sport. No Track and Field athlete had held sway like this. Now young people dream of being like her, and when she visited her former school in Ijebu Ode after becoming a World Champion, those students looked at her and realized she was once like them.
In 2023, all eyes will be on Tobi to see if she can replicate what she did in 2022, and while there was an initial furore with many questioning her WR, what a fatigued Amusan showed us on her last race, was a pointer to her critics that she is coming back strong. If she could still post a new Meet Record of 12.29s to win the Zurich DL trophy, a rejuvenated Amusan might even be going for her own record in 2023.
