It’s now over. Fears of pollution, human rights issues and protests taking over the Olympics never materialised. The Chinese pulled it off grand style, making the 2008 olympics theirs, and in those three weeks, owning it, in terms of sporting performance and the way the whole Olympic affair was executed from start to finish. It was truly wonderful.
Not only did China host the Olympics but they set themselves high standards in the different sporting events- participating in virtually all the events, with the hope of topping the medals table. And they did that too. Even though the Americans had more medals in total, China took over the top spot in the gold medal slot, and in so doing broke the hold of the Americans on the medal table since the fall of the Soviet Union.
However, and once again my beloved Ghana went to the Olympics and came back …with no medals. I guess for us the Olympics has become a sightseeing affair. It is one of the opportunities where instead of begging foreigners to visit our nation, we visit them. Consistently too, we always seem to go with more officials than athletes. It’s nothing strange here. I’m sure if the organisers had offered wooden medals to the top losers at these Olympics, Ghana would not have gotten even one! Nope, not a single one. And this is too is not strange. We have never taken sports seriously in this part of the equator.
Over here, the words “National team” means only one thing. Football. We don’t have any other national teams. Well, we do but when referring to other sporting disciplines at the national level, you have to qualify it. So national hockey team would let other people know that you are not referring to the “national team” but hockey. Indeed, sports news in the media almost always means football news. And we love to hire expensive foreign coaches to train our “national team”. No local coaches please. We believe in Ghana, but not local coaches.
But football has brought us little in terms of international honours outside of Africa. Even within Africa where we are touted as one of the powerhouses of football, our performance in recent years has been suspect. When talking about football, its always about medals we won before our parents conceived some us. And apart from the one bronze medal in football, all our Olympic medals have come from boxing. And if you are outside Ghana, don’t fool yourself into thinking that we pay much attention to boxing. Boxers don’t even have decent places to train.
So it was no news back here when we heard that Vida Anim had decided that enough was enough. She claimed to have unpaid bills, and the local Olympic committee had refused to settle those bills. Therefore, she was not competing anymore. She narrated how her hospital and physiotherapy bills had to be borne by her anytime she has medical problems. And she’s not the only one with those complaints. It seems that in Ghana, if you don’t do football, you are not considered to be involved in any serious sporting activity. Incredulously, I heard an official of the local Olympic committee on Joy FM accusing Vida of presenting dubious receipts, and of being ungrateful and unpatriotic. And other officials had no kind words. She was the villain.
Already, the Chinese have no plans of stepping down from the medals ladder come the next Olympics in London. And the Australians are miffed that the British beat at the medals table for the first time. And so they have started putting in plans to rectify this anomaly. No less a person than their prime minister is announcing their displeasure and their new plans of upsetting the Brits in their own backyard.
So with the little time I could spare, I watched as other nations had their national anthems played over and over again as they stepped forward to pick up their medals. I once wondered whether the organisers in China even had the faintest idea of where they had thrown the CD that had the Ghanaian national anthem.
I wondered why we didn’t go to the Chorkor beach and taken along a couple of the boys playing in the sand to compete in the canoeing, swimming and other water sports. The idea is not to really compete, but to fill up the numbers and give these boys some sort of travelling exposure. I’m sure that a few surprises would have materialised. You can never tell.
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