By Olalekan Okusan
Ese Brume and Usheoritse Itsekiri are already Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games bound athletes but the Coronavirus pandemic has halted their plans for the biggest sporting event in the world.
Brume, who is the 2019 World Championships bronze medallist arrived Nigeria in March with the hope to compete at the National Sports Festival – Nigeria’s biggest multi-sport competition – and then return to Cyprus as an undergraduate at Eastern Mediterranean University but she is tied down in Nigeria.
“I’m trying to cope with the current situation but it has not been easy,” Brume said. “Covid-19 happened suddenly and I’m trying to manage as best as I can and hope that things will become normal eventually. Postponing the Olympics was kind of sad but what can we do?
“ Hopefully when it is time for the Olympics, we will all be ready, because right now we aren’t fully training. I’m just here and waiting for this to pass,” Brume told the World Athletics website.
Like Brume, Usheoritse Itsekiri has been locked down with a training group in Arizona, United States. “If I had foreseen this situation, I would have probably remained in Nigeria because it’s important to be with family at this point in time, but I’m here alone in the US,” he said. “During the lockdown we couldn’t train as a group anymore. Three of us live in the same housing complex: myself, Anaso Jobodwana and Schillonie Calvert. We used to walk down to a park that’s less than five minutes away and do some grass runs. We found a track that’s about 380m. It wasn’t the best of tracks but we used that alongside the park just to stay fit.
“I feel terrible about the postponement of the Olympics by a year because there were so many plans and pushing it by a year is pushing all the plans one year back. Some people say it’s more time to prepare but regrouping and starting all over again, making the same plans you made in 2019 for 2020 and not knowing if it will work, waiting for a long time and doing the same thing is very difficult,” he lamented.
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