- Nigeria’s first Olympic medal winner, Nojim Maiyegun, has died at 83.
- The news was shared by his close friend Rudolfine F. Soultan in a moving Facebook post on Monday.
Nojim Maiyegun, who was Nigeria’s first Olympic medalist and a former boxer, has died at the age of 83.
The news was shared by his close friend Rudolfine F. Soultan in a moving Facebook post on Monday.
“My Jimmy died. I can’t say more about this right now because it’s just horrible. The day after tomorrow, we would have been together for 17 years,” Soultan wrote, expressing her grief.
Reports from The Cable state that Maiyegun passed away on Monday morning at his home in Vienna, Austria, after struggling with an undisclosed illness for several months.
At just 23 years old, he made history by winning Nigeria’s first Olympic medal—a bronze—in light-heavyweight boxing at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
His path to the medal included a remarkable win over Great Britain’s William Robinson, whom he defeated in only one minute and 59 seconds in the second round. He then moved on to the quarter-finals, where he beat Denmark’s Tom Bogs but lost to France’s Joseph Gonzalez in the semi-finals, earning him and Poland’s Józef Grzesiak bronze medals. In 1966, he added to his achievements by winning another bronze at the Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica.
After a successful amateur career, Maiyegun left Nigeria in 1971 to become a professional boxer, fighting 16 times and winning 12, with 10 of those wins by knockout.
