BREAKING NEWS: Wole Soyinka mediating the Odions Gold Medal Issue

Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka is currently looking into the Odions gold medal problem. He has been in touch with the Minister of Sports, Gimba and Caifas on this issue already. To quote Prof Soyinka, "Odion won his gold medal and he should have it".
Details will be made available as soon as we have more information on this.

Meanwhile, here is an interesting story on Soyinka that is not known to many chess players:

"In his younger days, Wole Soyinka used to play chess very well. He was also a chess enthusiast who followed keenly the Fischer-Spassky match of 1972. Incidentally, in September of 2007, at an International festival in Mantua, Soyinka was in Italy with Boris Spassky and others for the 2007 Festivalettaratura.

Spassky who was playing chess with a number of people at the time wanted Soyinka to sit to have a game of chess with him but Soyinka declined. He later joked that he did not want to be one of ‘Spassky’s sacrificial lambs’. “ I didn’t think I would last even one microsecond against him after a deliberate lay-off (from chess) of nearly 35 years! ". Soyinka and Spassky formed a good relationship in Italy. See the U tube video of Spasskys Simulteneous chess in Mantau on the left.

More on this interesting story to come at a later date. To those interested, here are some info on Wole Soyinka below:

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Elberg/Soyinka/soyinka-con0.html

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/soyinka/

http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=8329&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901060626-1205325,00.html