Paris 2024 Olympics: Brothers out to end Africa’s badminton jinx

Opeyori’s journey to the top of African badminton started in unexpected fashion – since he was actually playing Nigeria’s favourite sport at the time.

“I was playing football with my friends when the coach saw us,” he explained as he walked around the Rowe Park sport complex, where his journey began, in Lagos.

“I think he had very good insight because we were just normal kids playing football. But he introduced the game to us and immediately that he gave me the racket, I bonded with it.”

Despite having neither a racket nor shoes, with Opeyori borrowing both, a love had been born yet any hopes of rapid progress were further stymied by the limited badminton facilities in Africa’s most populous nation.

“It will amaze you to know that in Nigeria, we don’t have a single badminton facility – not one,” Francis Orbih, the president of the Badminton Federation of Nigeria, told BBC Sport Africa.

“In most public places, what you have is a multi-purpose hall – so that’s table tennis, badminton, gymnastics, boxing, basketball, handball etc. in just one hall. So when basketball has a two-week programme, badminton can’t train and that is a huge drawback.”

It was a trip to Asia in 2018 that changed Opeyori’s career, says Orbih.

For the year after attending a two-month training camp in Indonesia, a country that boasts eight Olympic badminton golds (and 21 overall), Opeyori won the first of his record four African men’s singles titles.

Having won the last three on offer, the African champion is now tipped to make his continent proud at the Olympics.

“If anyone is going to be able to break the jinx, it’s him – he has the capacity to do it,” says Orbih.

“He is disciplined, hardworking and passionate about the game, and that is what has brought him to where he is and kept him there.”