Team Nigeria Athletes and officials are reportedly at odds over Samsung phones supplied to athletes from each participating country at the ongoing Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

Samsung, one of the Olympic sponsors, offered each athlete competing in the Games a phone worth over $1,000, the Samsung S20+ 5G Olympics Games Athlete Edition.

According to our source, the protocol for receiving the phone was for each athlete to go to the Samsung office in Tokyo, scan their Olympic accreditation tag, and pick up the phone.

However, Team Nigeria officials are said to have collected the phones in bulk for all of the country’s participants.

The Athletics Integrity Unit excluded ten Nigerian athletes from competing in the track and field sports of the 2020 Olympics after they failed to meet anti-doping rules on Wednesday in the Team Nigeria camp.

Officials neglected to hand the 10 disqualified athletes their Samsung phones, according to a source in Tokyo who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity.
“Each athlete at the Olympics is entitled to one Samsung phone each. All they need to do is go to the Samsung office, scan their accreditation cards and get their phones. But the Nigerian delegation, through a very senior ministry official, went to the Samsung office and took all the phones for Team Nigeria athletes. Now the athletes went to meet the official and he said, ‘You are not competing, you can’t get a phone.’ But that’s not the rule, the rule says as long as you are an accredited Olympic athlete, you are meant to get a phone, it’s your right. But they are holding the phones, they are not giving the athletes because of their incompetence at not making the athletes compete. It’s the incompetence of the federation and the ministry, who should have done the right thing by making sure that their three out of 10 out-of-competition tests is complete,” he said.

An athlete was quoted as saying “If we don’t get our phones, we will protest.