Competitive fires still burn hot in gold medal wrestler Daniel Igali

The competitive fires still burn hot in Daniel Igali, the man who won an Olympic gold medal in wrestling for Canada at the 2000 Sydney Games.

Now a coach for his native Nigeria, Igali was fuming made after one of his wrestlers, Amarachi Obiajunwa, lost in 69 seconds to a Chinese opponent in a 72-kilogram match.

"When you know the level of your athletes, and the performances don't match their abilities, that's frustrating,'' Igali told Postmedia.

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"I have two female athletes here. They came and have not competed the way I expected them to. I am not happy. I obviously expected that there were some people who would beat them, but . . . they would put up a fight.''

Igali always put up a fight. From his decision to seek asylum in Canada following the 1994 Commonwealth Games through battling poverty so he could train and compete to win an Olympic medal.

His victory celebration in Sydney after winning in the 69-kilogram class remains one of the great moments in Canadian sport. Igali placed a Canadian flag on the mat, knelt down, kissed it and then ran around it. When the medal was hung around his neck he broke into tears and wept through the playing of the national anthem.

After the Olympics Igali earned a degree in criminology from Simon Fraser University and ran for provincial office in the 2005 election but lost. He recently was inducted into the International Wrestling Hall of Fame.

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Now 38, Igali lives in the village of Eniwari in Nigeria. He's a member of the Bayelsa provincial house of assembly and the technical director for Nigerian wrestling.

"Really, it's been good,'' he said, "I'm having a lot of fun back in Nigeria.

"My whole family is there, I grew up there. My grandma is almost 90 now. I lost my dad in 2002, so my mom is a widow. I was thinking it was time for me to go back and be with them, at least for the foreseeable future."

Igali also maintains a residence in Surrey, B.C., where his partner Franca and their two children, son Cedilla, 6, and one-year-old daughter Eddie live. He spends a couple of months a year there.

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"Obviously there's a lot of time management involved,'' Igali said.

Another of Igali's passions is promoting the Daniel Igali Foundation which raised $600,000 to build an education and sports academy named for Maureen Matheny, the woman who became his surrogate Canadian mother. Matheny died of cancer in 1999 soon after Igali became the first Canadian male to win the freestyle world championship.

The academy has 11 classrooms, a gym, an auditorium, a library, a computer room and a six-room accommodation complex. About 60 students are enrolled.

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For Nigerians wrestling is as important as hockey is to Canadians. The Olympics are like the Stanley Cup.

The country's best hope for a medal is Sinivie Boltic. He wrestles Sunday in the 96-kilogram class and is ranked fifth, the highest world ranking of any Nigerian athlete at the Games.

"People, including the country's president, will watch all our matches live on TV at home, and my wrestlers know that,'' Igali said. "People at home do not care about a world championship, but they care a lot about the Olympic Games, so there's a lot of pressure."

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