The reigning World 100m hurdles champion and record holder, Nigeria’s Tobi Amusan, will arrive in Budapest this evening to prepare for her event on Day 4 at the 19th World Athletics Championships, which will begin this Saturday.
The 26-year-old athlete was cleared of charges of three whereabouts failures by World Athletics on Thursday evening.
An excited Amusan left her base in Atlanta, USA at 11.30pm on Thursday night and arrived in Paris, France Friday morning. She will land in Budapest this evening.
Two-time President of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN), and now vice president of the the Nigeria Olympics Committee (NOC), Chief Solomon Ogba, disclosed this morning that Team Nigeria has arranged a ‘special room’ for Tobi in the Athletes Games Village to enable her concentrate on training for her event, which comes up on Day 4 of the championships.
The clearance provides Amusan with the opportunity to defend the World Championships title. She had successfully retrained her Nigeria, African Championships, African Games, Commonwealth Games, and Diamond League titles.
A tribunal of three arbitrators absolved Amusan of two out of the three missed tests, after the Nigerian athlete argued that the tester had not made sufficient efforts to locate her.
Amusan has been training in the U.S., and throughout the process, she consistently maintained her innocence and stated that she is a clean athlete.
She even mentioned on her Facebook page last month, “I have faith that this will be resolved in my favour and that I will be competing at the World Championships in August.”
However, credit must be given to AFN President, Tonobok Okowa, Technical Director, Samuel Onikeku and Secretary General, Rita Mosinde for their foresight in ensuring that Amusan’s name was included on the Main list of athletes forwarded to World Athletics before the expiration of deadline for submission of names for the World Championships.
