• Okagbare set to conquer

By Joe Apu

The world of attention has shifted to the tracks as the London 2017 World Championship gets underway. The focus of all Jamaican Usain Bolt who is quitting the tracks after a memorable career.

He has lived the Olympic ideal of faster, higher, stronger, they are strange words to attach to Usain Bolt.

Last Tuesday, at the front of a glitzy news conference, the media circus was called to attention, with the eight-time Olympic champion pulling his ‘to the world’ pose under a shower of ticker tape.

Above him shone the slogan ‘forever fastest’.

It was a subtle, but telling, change to his sponsor’s usual ‘forever faster’ tagline.

For Bolt is now pushing boundaries through sheer weight of gold-medal metal rather than an ever-lighter imprint on the clock.

His fastest 100m time so far this year is 9.95 seconds.

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At the same stage last year – in the build-up to the Rio Olympics – he had run 9.88.

Before the World Championships in Beijing in 2015, he had clocked 9.87.

Meanwhile, top Nigerian sprinter, Blessing Okagbare-Ighoteguonor, is in London for the IAAF World Championships.

The double medallists at the 14th edition of the championships in Moscow, Russia in 2013 says she is set to make Nigeria proud at the London stadium for the first round of the 100m event.

Okagbare is making her fourth trip to the championships.

Blessing Okagbare qualified for the London 2017 World Athletics Championships after jumping 6.77m to finish second at the Hungarian Memorial Athletics Grand Prix.

The University of Texas graduate has now exceeded the 6.75m mark set by the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) for the championships.

The 2008 Olympics bronze medallist came to Hungary with a 6.52m personal season’s best achieved in the United States, last month.

She has already secured qualification in the 100m and 200m races for the World Athletics Championships.