The last time I saw them was almost thirty years ago. Shortly before the suspension of Mr. Isaac Akioye from office as Director of the National Sports Commission both men left the shores of Nigeria after helping to develop a strong athletics culture and foundation for the country. Without doubt they were a very major part of the technical team Mr. Akioye assembled as he was leaving the University of Ife where he had established the university’s sports department to assume office as the second Director of Sports of the newly established National Sports Commission in Lagos. After successfully creating and organising the first national sports festival in 1973 and discovering a lot of talented athletes from it, Mr. Akioye brought in Lee Evans from the United States and Ron Davis (another American former athlete) from Sokoto where he was a teacher, to the NSC. He posted Lee to the University of Ife where he had admitted and assembled several young and extremely talented athletes, and Ron to the University of Benin that already had a rich pool of young exceptionally gifted athletes. He kept George Idibia at the commission’s headquarters in Lagos as head of the team. Lee and Ron, working with the respective State sports councils, did the talent discovery and development in Ife and Benin, and Idibia and Akioye did the finishing in Lagos. Between the four gentlemen, in two years, working far from the glare of the rest of the world athletics community they nurtured into maturity, perhaps, Nigeria’s greatest athletics ensemble in preparation for the Olympic Games of Montreal, Canada, in 1976!

So Lee Evans is back in Nigeria. He is a legend of track and field. In 1968 at the Mexico Olympics he won two Gold medals in 400m and the 4 X 400 m relay and broke the world record in both. I have always been curious to know how Lee Evans came to Nigeria soon after he retired after the 1972 Olympics. This past week I asked him. It had to do with the story of how he met Isaac Akioye. It is interesting. Soon after winning the Gold medal in 1968 Lee received tonnes of congratulatory letters. Of the lot one letter stood out, not because it had a different message from the rest but because it came from Africa, from an unknown Nigerian who called himself Isaac Akioye, wishing him well and seeking his acquaintance. After that Mr. Akioye and Lee kept in touch with each other and Akioye kept him abreast of his vision for Nigerian sports and his journey into sports development in the country. When Akioye offered him an opportunity to come to the NSC to join him in developing a national athletics programme for Nigeria the offer was too tempting to turn down. Lee accepted the offer and came to Nigeria. He teamed up with Ron Davis as the pioneer foreign athletics coaches in the NSC. There were several other foreign coaches in other sports including football. That’s how Lee Evans, Ron Davis, and George Idibia (a Nigerian coach) became the members of Mr. Isaac Akioye’s dream team that built a solid base for the development of world class Nigerian athletes!

Both Lee and Ron left the services of the NSC in 1979 after fast-tracking Nigeria’s place at the apex of African athletics at the third All-Africa Games in Algeria! Some thirty years after, with experiences establishing athletics programmes in 6 other African countries, working with great athletes all over the continent, and returning to America to serve as athletics directors in an American university, both Lee Evans and Ron Davis are back in Nigeria to join, hopefully, once again, in reviving Nigeria’s original vision to become one of the best nations on earth in track and field particularly the sprints and jumps. I met both gentlemen in Abuja this past week helping to prepare the Nigerian team going to Berlin next week for the World Athletics championship! It was a happy re-union for us. They remembered me quite well from the past, after all we were together in Lagos as they prepared Nigerian athletes for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada. We went to Montreal together as well as the All-Africa Games in Algiers. They left shortly after that when the crisis in the NSC started to brew!

Both men still think very highly of Isaac Akioye whom they describe as a legend and the greatest visionary of sports they have ever met in all their exploits across the African continent. They speak of how Mr. Akioye provided extra-ordinary leadership and helped them build a formidable team of Nigerian athletes that would have shocked America and the world in 1976 had the African governments not called for the African boycott that truncated what could have been Nigeria’s greatest moments in sports. They said they were planning to surprise the world with unknown athletes from Nigeria who were running times in the sprints that were at par with the best in the world at the time. The other sports also had their surprise packages including Obisia Nwankpa and Davidson Andeh in Boxing, and the Green Eagles in football!

Lee and Ron speak of their American colleagues who went to Jamaica at the time they were coming to Nigeria to also develop the athletics programme of that small country of two and a half million Black people of African descent. Lee tells me to look at Jamaica today and see the product of that programme sustained through the years. Jamaica has become the world’s most formidable country of sprinters! That programme is still producing the likes of Ashafa Powell, Usain Bolt and an endless stream of young male and female sprinters. Nigeria lost the opportunity to produce 50 times whatever Jamaica is producing now if only the country had sustained the programme and momentum set by Isaac Akioye. They lament the death of Nigerian athletics and wonder how the country got it so wrong and allowed things to get this bad with the country’s sports. The good news is that Lee and Ron are back at the invitation of the new head of the Nigerian Athletics Federation and they have not lost any of their previous enthusiasm, excitement and vision. Lee tells me that Nigeria remains the greatest reservoir of natural athletes in the world. He saw that thirty years ago and he still sees it monitoring the few Nigerian athletes in the States and since his arrival in the country a few weeks ago.

Although no contract has been entered into with them by the AFN or NSC, they hope that will be done soon so that they can begin work once again to unearth, train and guide Nigerian athletes through the long, enduring and often torturous journey to the top of world athletics. They also think athletics development should be anchored to the school system, that training centres must be established in different parts of the country and manned by experienced coaches. They believe young Nigerian athletes in schools should be supported to enter athletics programmes in selected American universities. They think the future of athletics in Nigeria is very bright indeed.

Meeting and discussing with Lee Evans and Ron Davis re-kindled my hope for athletics in Nigeria, and that things will soon change. I encouraged them to disallow any hardships or shortcomings they will definitely encounter to discourage or frustrate them, and to see this second coming as another opportunity to better what they did here in their first coming. Mr. Isaac Akioye may not be physically here anymore but in his place is one is a pioneer beneficiary of Akioye’s succession programme, who was trained by him and who inherits all his best tenets and vision – Patrick Ekeji! I can see that they both love this country and are ready and willing to give up a lot in serving Nigeria. I assure them that the future holds great promise and that they should be a part of the historic wind of change that will soon be blowing across this country in the not too distant future!