It’s almost a week to the day that the curtains fell on the 33rd Olympiad with Team Nigeria failing to pull her weight, having left the beautiful French capital, Paris, without a single medal. While countries like Saint Lucia, the Dominican Republic, Botswana, and Guatemala, all with a fraction of the population of the so-called Giant of Africa, punched above their weights by winning gold medals, Nigeria, with a population nudging over 200 million, failed to see any of her athletes even get near to mounting the podium. Even the Refugee Olympic Team managed to secure a bronze medal! Botswana, with a population of just over 2.
4 million, took only 11 athletes to Paris for two events (athletics and swimming) and even stole the headlines when Letsile Tebogo stunned the bookies and all the big names to win the gold in the 200m. Tebogo, who set a national record of 9.86 when finishing sixth in 100m final, produced a dominant last 50 metres and crossed the line in 19.
46 seconds, beating his chest as he became the fifth-fastest man in history over 200m, and was also the first African to do so. The 21-year-old showed his versatility by also being part of his nation’s 4×100 and 4x400m teams powering the tiny nation to silver in the longer race just finishing behind the US. On the other hand, Nigeria went to Paris with 88 athletes and still finished empty handed in the 11 events entered for.
It was sad seeing Team Nigeria’s athletes, even the highly rated stars like Tobi Amusan, world record holder in the 100m hurdles, wrestler Blessing Oborududu, who won a silver medal in the Women’s freestyle 68 kg event and Ese Brume, also a bronze medallist at the last Games in Tokyo, floundering in the Paris sunshine For millions of us the once-glorious days of seeing Team Nigeria athletes doing well on the international stage in various disciplines, ranging from track and field to boxing, weightlifting and wrestling, are now fast becoming fading memories. But in all honesty, is it any surprise? Sadly, the answer is no as what happened in Paris encapsulates the general malaise that has affected virtually all facets of our nation. We are living witnesses to how despite the best efforts of the government to paint a different narrative, non-state actors are still causing sorrow, tears and blood in many homes across the country.
Only last week, the nefarious activities of these criminals were brought closer when the wife, two daughters and eight family members of our Kogi State correspondent, Muhammed Bashir, were abducted in Kaduna where they had gone to spend their holidays. Also, some weeks ago the sister of our house keeper was kidnapped in Benue while on her way to attend a burial. The woman was only released after a ransom of N400, 000 was paid.
The kidnappers had originally asked for N5 million and only accepted the payment after much pleading from the family and relations of the abducted woman. Of course reactions have trailed the Paris flop of Team Nigeria. Immediately after the Games, Sports Minister, John Owan Enoh, apologised and promised not to only get to the root cause of the failure but also ensure that there will be no repeat in Los Angeles 2028.
Then on Wednesday night, speaking on a Lagos-based private television, he opened up further saying that, unlike his counterparts in other ministries, he is unable to develop the sector due to the constraints imposed by the laws governing various sporting federations. He said he would have made changes to the leadership of many sports federations due to the shortcomings he noticed when he took over, but he is not empowered to do so. The minister lamented that without major reforms to ensure the right people are managing various federations, the sports sector may continue to suffer.
“I have expressed my intentions regarding the need to reform our federations. The leadership of these federations is elected by congresses for a term of four years. For example, my colleague in aviation may examine the agencies and parastatals under his ministry and find that there are people who may not be able to contribute enough to his goals.
He can then work towards replacing them. However, the minister of sports does not have that luxury. “We need to look into this,” he noted.
However, he said that despite the limitations, he is still keen to ensure that anyone found culpable for the national embarrassment in Paris pays at the end of the investigation he has initiated. “You don’t fire unless you interrogate, some of the issues that caused embarrassment, like the Favour Ofilli matter, the kit issue, we are not going to let them lie low, heads will roll if we found people liable for the kind of negative publicity we had at the Olympics,” he said. Unfortunately, if history is anything to go by, we should take the minister’s statement with a pinch (perhaps even more) of salt.
I was still in university when the Moscow ’80 ‘sex scandal’ rocked our Olympic participation in the former Soviet Union. Government vowed to get to the root of why we flopped so spectacularly and promised it will never happen again. Incidentally, even though we did better four years later at the Los Angeles Olympics, winning a silver and bronze medal; we then flopped again at Seoul’88.
The nation bounced back at Barcelona’92 with three silver and a bronze medal. However, four years later, everything fell in place and Team Nigeria put up their best Olympic performance, winning two gold, one silver and three bronze medals. Team Nigeria’s decent run continued four years later with the nation leaving Australia with a gold and silver medal.
At Athens 2004, Team Nigeria could only garner two bronze medals, while it rose to three silver and two bronze medals at Beijing 2008. London 2012 saw another reversal with Team Nigeria leaving the British capital with no medals while it was able to squeeze a solitary bronze four years later in Rio. At the last Olympic Games in Tokyo, Team Nigeria was able to muster a silver and bronze medal.
So, unless the minister is able to defy all the odds and ensure proper funding and preparation of our athletes over the next four years, then sadly, we should not expect anything better from Team Nigeria in Los Angeles..
