IT can be argued; but since many Nigerians attained the age of reason, not a few of them hold the thought that the country’s outings at the Olympics are often a well organised egregious jamboree. However, one of those outings negates that thought. That was in 1996 when we won six medals in one summer Olympics games. That glorious year, Nigeria won two gold, one silver and three bronze medals. It was one outing many Nigerians still remember with enormous delight. 25 years after that feat many still refer to Atlanta 96 as “the Olympics we won.”
Before the Atlanta 96 outing, many would recall Nigerians who had worked with grit and sheer determination to get to the proverbial Olympian height in their variously distinguished sports careers. People my age woke up to the glorious morning of sports personalities that were unique in their own gifts and service to fatherland. They were household names and their faces were easily recognisable anywhere you turn.
Pre-Atlanta 96 Summer Olympics, we had participated in Barcelona ‘92 and the preceding Seoul ‘88 and in the games of the summer Olympics of 1984 in Los Angeles. We can trace our participation down to the first outing in Helsinki and so on. But where are the heroes of those games? To so many, what readily comes to mind is the opening ceremony of those games. To so many others, it is the exploits of the athletes. To the country and its handlers, it’s good night baby until the eve of another Olympics. Then the scramble begins…
One of the indelible take-aways of the 1992 summer games in Barcelona is our three silver and one bronze medals. The quartet made up of Chidi Imoh, Davidson Ezinwa, Olapade Adenekan and Oluyemi Kayode won silver in the 4×100 meters relay. That team also had Osmond, the twin brother of Davidson. David Izonritei and Richard Igbineghu won silver in boxing while our bronze came from the quartet of Beatrice Utondu, Christy Opara-Thomson, Mary Onyali and Faith Idehen. It was a beautiful outing, and who would forget that magical lighting of the Olympics torch to signal the official commencement of the 1992 summer games? It was graceful archery at its best. Before Barcelona, our futile efforts at the Seoul games, especially in the football event, despite all the hope are better forgotten.
However, Los Angeles was the first time Nigeria would get a podium finish in the athletics event at the Olympics. It was in 1984 in the 4×400 event in which we scooped the relay bronze medal. It felt so good that to millions, it was worth the gold. This is when we consider the Cold War, the tight grip of some super powers on who gets what and the raw athletics efforts that went into winning it. That quartet of Sunday Uti (first Nigerian to run a sub-45 in 400 meters); Moses Ugbesien, Rotimi Peters and of course the evergreen Innocent Egbunike created that record. Their time of 2:59.32 stood for 16 years as African record before another set of Nigerian quarter milers broke the record.
Clement Chukwu, Jude Monye, Enefiok Udo-Obong and their captain, Sunday Bada broke the record on 20 September, 2000 in a fashion that many would remember for a long time. 18-year-old Udo-Obong, who was coming from the junior ranks and was running outside Africa for the first time, did the magic after a lot of work by the preceding trio. He had taken the baton at the final lap at fourth position. He tore through the tracks in a blistering fashion. The youngster in a race that belied his age and experience breezed past the runners from The Bahamas and Jamaica but could not catch-up with the United States. They were silver medalists in an African record of 2:58.68. The team was eventually awarded the gold medal in 2012 when one of the American runners, Antonio Pettigrew, confessed that he used performance-enhancing drugs before the race. And no one will query the desirability of the gold medal for those Nigerians’ effort.
But, like many things Nigerian, these national heroes are now distant memories; a blurred part of our life. By the glaring, deliberate refusal to build on the patches of our successes of the past, we have allowed the labours of our heroes past to be in vain. The labour of our heroes past has receded into oblivion. The various international meets we participate in recently are times to abandon ourselves to the hands of fate. We rely on fortuitous events to win medals. Those who do well are mostly people based outside the country, who have Nigerian origin and who decided to represent us. We do not build our representatives – what we refer to as home-grown talent.
Experts hold that for any athlete to stand a chance in the Olympics, the athlete would need to put in about 10,000 hours of training preparatory to the games. The focus of such training, they contend, should also be more on the athlete and not on the federations, a platform that we have turned to tool for dirty political manueverings here. When England performed woefully in Los Angeles in 1984, the country came up with a long-term plan and was determined to do well. Today, that country is reaping the fruit of that planning. They are harvesting laurels in canoeing, kayaking and even boxing and wrestling, which used to be the forte of Nigeria. That is using just Great Britain as an example.
Nigeria has the potential to rise to the occasion, but the country is increasingly degenerating in governance, which has ultimately affected everything the country is involved in as a body. Officials of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) is currently enmeshed in a dirty war with themselves on the one hand and the Nigerian Ministry of Sports on the other. The issues are so much that we were literally showing what it means to wash your dirty linen in public. That is what Nigeria’s shot put athlete did with his Instagram post showing him washing his jersey for the finals of the men’s shot put event in Tokyo!
Serious federations are identifying areas of their advantage in sports and are groomimg athletes to win laurels in them and make their countries proud. We are still far from doing that, evn though we had spoken about this for ages. Otherwise, we should have maintained a lead in some particular sports. Young people paddle canoes for fun in the Niger Delta. Why can we not explore that? Numerous festivals abound in Rivers State in which dexterity with canoes and the river is exhibited. We could gain more than occasional tourist earnings from such. Countries are excelling in canoeing and kayaking.
These could be our new boxing, our former goldmine in sports. We could add the new sports to athletics, our neglected fertile vineyard.
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