Nigeria and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics

 

 “Over the last 16 days, you amazed us with your sporting achievements. With your excellence, with your joy, with your tears, you created the magic of these Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. You were faster, you went higher, you were stronger, because we all stood together – in solidarity. You were competing fiercely with each other for Olympic glory. At the same time, you were living peacefully together under one roof in the Olympic Village. This is a powerful message of solidarity and peace”

–International Olympic Committee President, Thomas Bach, during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games on August 8, 2021

I heartily congratulate Japan for the successful hosting of the 32nd Olympic Games from July 23 – August 8, 2021. Hosting a game with over 11,000 athletes in attendance during a pandemic such as COVID-19 is not easy. Remember, the event was shifted like the Euro 2020 football competition from 2020 to 2021. There were a lot of protests from the Japanese on the need to either cancel outright or further postpone the Olympics due to the fear of the pandemic especially when the highly contagious Delta variant was discovered in Japan shortly before the commencement of the Games.

Luckily, the International Olympic Committee and the Tokyo Games Organising Committee were able to severely contain the spread with only 430 cases picked up, including 32 in the Olympic Village. Athletes and officials were expected to be fully vaccinated before coming and wear their masks except when in training, competing, eating or sleeping. Spectators were also not allowed into the stadia to watch the Games live. We all had to watch the live broadcasts on cable channels or the Internet live streaming. Forbes online claimed that Japan’s National Audit Board initially reported that the final cost of hosting the summer Games would be about $22 billion before Nikkei and Asahai put the bill at a whopping $28 billion.

In the XXXII Olympics, 205 countries and territories as well as the IOC Refugee Olympic Team participated while North Korea pulled out. The IOC Refugee Olympic Team consists of independent Olympic participants from the likes of Syria and South Sudan with 29 athletes competing. Well, at the end of the 16 days quadrennial sporting fiesta, the United States of America came first with a total medal haul of 113 made up of 39 Gold, 41 Silver and 33 Bronze. China came second with 38 Gold, 32 Silver and 18 Bronze, a total of 88 medals   while the host country, Japan, won 27 Gold, 14 Silver and 17 Bronze, amounting to a total of 58 medals, to come third on the medal log. Nigeria placed 74 in the world and eighth in Africa having won only one Silver and one Bronze.

According to the Cable News Network, while the inaugural Athens 1896 Games involved only nine sports and 43 events, Tokyo 2020 featured 33 sports and a whopping 339 medal events, making it the biggest Olympic event till date. At the Tokyo 2020, the IOC included four new sports – karate, surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing. Baseball and softball made a return to the Olympic list. Many world and Olympic records were shattered at the event while an estimated 17 World Records were broken in the 16-day sporting fiesta.

According to the IOC, “The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating the youth through sport practised without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” This is very true given the fact that athletes from countries who have strained relations with one another compete peacefully together. That is the power of sports.

At a personal level, I probably would not have known of the existence of the following countries and territories but for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics: Guam, Kiribati, Cook Islands, Aruba, Cayman Island, Suriname, Saint Kits & Navis, Tuvalu, Dominica, Nauru, Palau, Timor-Leste, Bhutan, Belize, Micronesia, and Solomon Islands. The 16 days the Games lasted provided a positive distraction for me from the negative news of insecurity and lack of resources in the country.

I specially use this medium to celebrate some of the outstanding athletes such as Dani Alves, the 38-year-old Brazilian football player who captained his country’s football team to the football gold medal and thus became the most decorated football player in history after Brazil defeated Spain 2-1 in the Olympic Final last Saturday. This medal takes the ex-Barcelona man’s personal trophy haul to 43. Congratulations are also in order to the following athletes:  Norway’s Karsten Warholm, who broke his own world record in the men’s 400-metre hurdles; American swimmer, Caeleb Dressel, who broke his own world record in the men’s 100-metre butterfly final and won five gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics. Others I celebrate are Poland’s Aleksandra Miroslaw who broke the women’s speed climbing world record and Tatjana Schoenmaker of South Africa who set the first individual swimming world record of the Tokyo Olympics in the women’s 200-metre breaststroke.

As for my country, Nigeria, though coming 74 out of over 200 countries and territories is not a bad outing per se, it is a sub-optimal performance. In Nigeria’s 69 years of Olympic participation since 1952, the country has only won a handful of medals: 27 in all. They include three Gold, 11 Silver and 13 Bronze. Nigeria’s debut in the Olympics was in 1952 at Helsinki, Finland. We did not win any medal until the Tokyo 1964 Olympics where Nojim Mayegun gave the country a bronze medal in boxing. Nigeria placed 35 on the overall medals table with that lone medal. It was in 1972 Munich Olympics held in Germany that we won another Bronze medal also in boxing, this time through Isaac Ikhouria. In the 1972 edition, we placed 43 on the medals roll. Nigeria did not participate in the Montreal Olympics in Canada in 1976.

It was not until the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in USA that Nigeria was able to better previous outings with 1 silver and 1 bronze to place 30th on the medals table. Peter Konyegwachie won the silver medal for us in boxing while we won the bronze in the Men’s 4×400 metre relay. In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in Spain, Nigeria improved her medal haul with three silver and one bronze to place 38 on the overall medals log while our golden moment and best Olympic outing was at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics in the USA where the country won the gold, one silver and three bronze to place 38 on the overall medals table. From that 1996 Olympian height, Nigeria’s performance has subsequently been depreciating. In 2000 Sydney Olympics in Australia, we managed to win one gold, and two silver to place 41st on the medals log. At the 2004 Athens Olympics in Greece, Nigeria struggled to win two bronze medals to place 68 on the overall table.

In the 2008 Beijing Olympics in China, we picked up yet again slightly by winning three silver and two bronze to place 57th on the overall medals table. We didn’t win anything in the 2012 London Olympics in the UK and only managed to win a bronze medal in the 2016 Rio De Janeiro Olympics in Brazil where we placed 78th on the overall medals table. Thus, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics outing where Blessing Oborududu gave the country her first medal in wrestling (silver) and Ese Brume gave us another medal in long jump (bronze) placing us in the 74th position is better than our last outing.

I am not unaware of the controversies surrounding our participation in Tokyo from the declaration of 10 of our athletes as ineligible to compete by the Athletics Integrity Unit over not meeting the minimum testing requirements under Rule 15 to  Blessing Okagbare being  provisionally suspended following a positive test for human growth hormone also by  the AIU, the inability of Enoch Adegoke to have his coach and physiotherapist with him in Tokyo and the controversies over the cancellation of Puma’s  $2.7 million kit deal with Nigeria.  It is saddening that we did not qualify for both men’s and women’s football at the Games neither did I see any of our athletes in weightlifting and boxing which happened to be our areas of comparative advantage. The long and short of the whole brouhaha is that the Nigerian contingent was ill-prepared despite having five years to get ready after the disastrous outing five years ago in Brazil.

We can turn the table around for better in 2024 Paris Olympics in France. All we need do is to have a blueprint for sports development in Nigeria. I am glad that the Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, has deemed it fit to refurbish the Lekan Salami Stadium at Adamasingba, Ibadan. He needs to go beyond that by investing heavily in the Shooting Stars Sports Club better known as 3SC. All the governors need to invest strategically in sports where their states have comparative advantages by promoting grassroots sports development. Beyond being used for laundering the image of a country, sports are multibillion dollar business that provides direct and indirect employment opportunities and help to promote peace and unity. I look forward to when an African country will host the Olympics just like South Africa was given the opportunity to host the World Cup in football in 2010.