TORIOLA TO MAKE HISTORY AT THE OLYMPIC

Mary Onyali-Omagbemi and Bose Kaffo have featured in five Olympic Games, but Segun Toriola will this month in London inscribe his name in history as the first Nigerian and African to make a sixth appearance at the world’s biggest sporting event. Toriola’s record in Africa is unequalled. He has a quite stunning 20 medals of which 14 are gold and he has won the Men’s Singles title on four occasions. At the 1995 All Africa Games in Harare, Zimbabwe, he won and four years later, he retained the title in Johannesburg; in 2003, he succeeded in Abuja and in 2007, in Algeria. At Maputo 2011, he relinquished the title to Egypt’s Omar Assar. Also, Toriola has a most distinguished record in the African Championships and African Cup, while he became the first ever Men’s Singles winner when table tennis made its debut at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester 2002. Since making his debut at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in Spain, Toriola has been present in Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and Beijing. At the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games in China, his performance was one of the highs of the games when he also became the first Blackman and African to play in the last 32 of the Olympics. Toriola, who plies his trade in France, said yesterday that he never expected that he would be playing in his sixth Olympics having started as a teenager in 1992: The Guardian