Commonwealth Games 2018: Cameroon team jets home after eight go AWOL

Cameroon has been forced to fly its team home from the Commonwealth Games after a third of its athletes vanished.

Weightlifter Minkoumba Petit David is one of the missing Cameroon athletes. Photo: Getty Images

Cameroon has been forced to fly its team home from the Commonwealth Games after a third of its athletes vanished.

UPDATE: Peter Dutton says he’ll track Cameroons athletes down

Eight of its 24-strong team fled the athletes’ village and were last night lying low. Team officials said the eight were not returning calls and it was believed they were hoping to stay in Australia.

The team called in police after discovering five boxers and three weightlifters had disappeared under the cover of darkness in three waves, starting on the weekend.

The “very, very embarrassed” Cameroon team admitted they did not expect the athletes to return.

The African nation’s chef de mission, Victor Agbor Nso, yesterday said: “The Cameroon Commonwealth Games team is sad to announce that eight of the 24 athletes they took to the 21st Commonwealth Games … are missing from their respective rooms in the Games village.”

The athletes had been part of a pre-Games training camp at Warwick on Queensland’s Darling Downs. Six of the missing athletes competed in their Games events while the other two failed to turn up for weigh-in.

Mr Nso said the boxers were Fotsala Simplice, Fokou Arsene, Ndzie Tchoyi Christian, Yombo Ulrich and Ndiang Christelle. The weightlifters were Matam Olivier Heracles, Minkoumba Petit David and Fouodji Sonkbou.

More than 40 athletes, mostly from Africa, overstayed their visas after the Melbourne Games in 2006, and more than 100 athletes stayed on after the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Games federation chief executive David Grevemberg said the situation was being monitored.