'This my hand,' the ageing Nojim Maiyegun tapped at his left arm's atrophied bicep. 'I knocked out many people with this hand.' The old man glowed with pride as his revelation tickled out giggles from the guests who had squeezed into his dimly lit apartment in Vienna, Austria.
Idris ShehuNojim Maiyegun won bronze medal in boxing at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo -- Nigeria's first-ever medal at the Games
But Nigeria will remember Maiyegun till eternity. He will remain the country’s vanguard soldier in its quest for dominance in the world of sports. A pioneer in the Nigerian sports fraternity that nothing before could surpass and little after can outshine. A hallowed ancestor of the country’s excellence in global sporting. He will remain Nigeria’s first-ever Olympic medalist.Maiyegun breathed his last on Monday at his base in Austria.
“It wasn’t long before I began to see my name in the newspapers as the next big thing in Nigerian boxing. I was excited, and that was when my parents reduced the criticism of the sport. They never really liked boxing because they believed it was for hooligans,” he said.Maiyegun won Nigeria’s first-ever Olympic medal in 1964
“The award was eventually retrieved by the sports ministry the following year for no reason at all. I was thinking the award would belong to me forever, but they took it back.” Within two years, he was notorious throughout Austria for his ferocity in the ring. Austrian newspapers’ cartoons depicted Maiyegun’s gloved hands as guns to demonstrate how lethal his punches were.
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