Falling from the Olympic height

A An Olympian is a person who participates or has participated in the Olympic Games, regardless of whether the person wins a medal or not. Historically, an Olympian is associated with Mount Olympus in northeastern Greece, or with the Greek gods whose home was traditionally there. This is why being eligible to participate in that famous Olympic event means that someone has demonstrated outstanding athletic skills and achieved excellent results in his or her respective sport. When the person goes on to win medals at the Olympic Games, he or she is called an Olympic champion. The athletes who win medals are so revered that they are considered sports gods on par with the great Greek gods who inhabited Mount Olympus in Thessaly. It is always a tragedy to fall from a mountain, but it is always catastrophic to fall from an Olympic height. Such is the story of Nigeria at the recent Olympic Games in Paris, where they fielded about 88 athletes and came back with no medals. How the mighty have fallen! A nation that other nations should respect as gods is now ridiculed as trash. Who did this to us?

• Enoh

There was a time when naira was more powerful than dollar and pound and was considered an international currency in international economic forums, today naira has become such a mess that even Nigerians in Nigeria are doing their business in Nigeria in foreign currency. It will be a fair assessment to say that Nigeria today is going from planlessness to planlessness, mistake to mistake, deception to deception, incompetence to incompetence and corruption to corruption.

Our Olympic foray in Paris summed up our situation in Nigeria. We had the case of an athlete who qualified to participate in the Olympic Games but whose name was removed from participation in the Olympic Games. So far, nothing has happened. The authorities are still investigating whose job it was to ensure that all qualified Nigerians are guaranteed their rightful place to participate in the games after the rigorous efforts for qualification. We had another athlete who was disqualified from participating in the Tokyo Olympics four years ago because her name was misspelled. She changed allegiance and participated in the Paris Olympics for another country and won a medal.

We had a cyclist who was called up at the last minute to compete in the Paris Olympics and had to borrow the bike that he was using to compete in the Games. I have read a number of lame excuses that he had to borrow the bike at the last minute because of the urgency of the moment and because there was a specific type of bike that had to be used for the competition; that even if the bike was ordered, it would take about two months before it would be delivered to the athlete for use, and by then the Games would be over. It is disheartening that our leaders sometimes openly expose their incompetence in an attempt to defend the indefensible. This excuse has shown that the sports directors knew in advance that there was a specific type of bike that had to be used for the Games and this meant that even if the athlete had trained for the competition beforehand, he had not trained on the correct bike that was being used for the Games. If he had trained before the Games on his own recommended correct bike for the Games, he would simply go into the competition on his bike and win us a medal. It is clear that because he did not train with the right equipment, he will perform poorly or below his potential on a borrowed bike at the Olympics. He may not have ridden that brand of bike for the first time before he entered the competition. If you do not plan, you plan to fail. There are other cases of low morale that have affected even the more celebrated athletes who have previously won medals in other world-class competitions.

The unfortunate revelation of the games was that more indigenous Nigerians competed for other countries and won medals for them while Nigerians who performed for Nigeria did not win medals. No one should preach the gospel of patriotism to these helpless youths who are living on borrowed time with regard to sports activities. The Olympic Games are held every four years and there is no guarantee that an athlete will get another chance to compete in the next four years. He may become too old for the sport, or get injured, or be overtaken by another more gifted athlete, or lose interest in the sport or get married and start a new family which may reduce the time he/she has for the sport. These are some of the reasons why athletes seize every opportunity they get at the Olympics as if it were their last. Can you tell anyone with a clear conscience that the female athlete whose name was omitted from the list of participants in the Olympics for no reason at all, and probably without anyone being held accountable for such a blunder, will hesitate to pledge allegiance to another country and carry its flag to compete in the next Olympics, if that is what she has to do to achieve her dream? I bet she will. The youth of this country have paid too much for the incompetence and corruption of their leaders in this country. Anyone who still asks them to pay a further price is simply asking for their blood.

If you define such youths who are fighting for their destiny as unpatriotic because they tried to compete for another country while their own country failed, neglected or refused to provide the environment for them to perform, how do you describe this group of leaders who are doing worse things? Nigeria is an oil producing nation with four refineries. These leaders have collected billions of dollars and pretended to fix them but to no avail. They have deliberately left them in a state of disrepair so that they can import all the refined oil products at inflated prices. The quantity consumed and their prices are inflated. The importers enjoy a monopoly and this helps them build a mafia around the trade. They use the ill-gotten stolen money from the stolen crude oil to build refineries outside their own country, employ foreigners to work in their foreign refineries while the youths at home wander the streets jobless. They ship our crude oil, which they have stolen from the country, to their refineries abroad and ship the refined oil back to Nigeria. They then inflate the quantity and the price at which they sell the oil back to Nigeria. They then collect subsidy from Nigeria at this inflated price.

There is only one source they extort money from: the common man. When individuals build their own refineries in Nigeria, they will fail to give them crude oil to feed their refineries. They frustrate Nigerians to produce in Nigeria and import their own products from outside Nigeria in the name of alleviating the scarcity of those goods in Nigeria with high incentives for those imported items such as removing tariffs paid on such goods. What unpatriotic leaders. They should remove the log from their eyes to see clearly before they try to remove the speck from the eyes of these young people who decide to fight for another country when their own country fails them.

It was not nice for the Minister of Sports to come in and make excuses for the abysmal performance of our athletes in the last Olympic Games in Paris. One excuse was that he came in just over a year ago, before the Olympic Games. This excuse is not tangible. I know of football coaches who were brought in between crucial games when the former coaches were suddenly sacked, they took charge and delivered for their teams. One year was more than enough for any competent person with the capacity to perform. The other excuse was that most sports federations had elected leadership and the hands of the Minister were tied to deal decisively with them since the international sports federation deals directly with them. This excuse is still untenable because the Minister and the government provide the funds for the games and are the authorities that will hold the people accountable for the results. As I write this, I cannot claim to know the names of any president or leader of any sports federation in Nigeria but I hold the Minister and the President responsible for our abysmal performance in Paris. And rightly so, because they are the ones who legally have the power and the money to run the sport for them.

The solutions to our problems are clear. We must start preparing for the next Olympic Games today. We must investigate the causes of our abysmal performance and punish all who fall short. The Minister must find a way to use the carrot and stick approach to force the federations to adhere to his policy on sports. We must stop copying hook, line and sinker the modus operandi of foreign countries because they have strong institutions that do not have a systemic problem of corruption. The elected leaders of the foreign federations work patriotically for their countries and have a litany of private wealthy entities to support them. Their elections are free and fair and they produce competent men of characterto manage their sporting activities. Nigeria has no strong institutions and no free and fair elections, resulting in criminals emerging as leaders of the sporting activities. The minister must find a way to take charge to save our sporting world from international ridicule and collapse. Sports has become a vital tool for unity among the people and everyone must lend a helping hand to support its upliftment.

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