Welcome From Paris 2024: The Story of Team Nigeria

NaijablaseTv ( Ettah Emmanuel O.)

We have returned with not a single medal from the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics Games. It is either we did not prepare for the Games, do not still understand sports, do not particularly understand the Olympics, or all of the above.

I followed the occasional media and public euphoria about this or that athlete qualifying in the heats into the quarter or semi finals of their respective events, but I knew that the finals are always a different ball game.

I however will continue to cherish the women's basketball team, even as they finally lost to the USA in the quarter finals. They dared the odds and showed promise. Had Sunday Dare not disrupted their flow with the two year ban from international events which he decreed, apparently in a bid to install his preferred pallies into the leadership of the NBBF, and by which our D'Tigress lost the opportunity of participating in the 2022 FIBA Women World Cup before he rescinded his decree, perhaps they would have been richer and better by experience.

Let me also say outright that I cannot blame the present Sports Minister, Senator John Owan Enoh-JOE, for the poor show in Paris. The Olympic circle gives four years for preparation and he is new in the system, just about a year and some months. Therefore, he couldn't have been a great part of our preparations, except for ensuring the release of funds for the ceremonial part of the process. 

I say "ceremonial" because champions are actually made in the gym, not on the competition ground. It takes between 8 to 12 years to build a potential Olympic champion, depending on when he or she is discovered, and another four years to prepare him or her for the win. Enoh could only have worked with what he met on ground.

That means that it is the two Sports Ministers in the eight years of the last regime that are to blame for having planted nothing from which we have now harvested nothing in due season. One was bereft of decorum, loquaciously malicious and cantankerous. The other was a mere propagandist showman, essentially empty but full of self-conceit even in his terrible ignorance. 

I must also say that, obviously, our entire sports establishment has not been doing any proper SWAT, if at all, on our participation in global sports, otherwise they should have been able to discern our steady decline at the Olympics, just like in some other global competitions, in the past two decades, and to plot strategic programmes to pull us up.

The records are there. The mid 90s was the golden era of our sports. In football, we won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1994, for the second time after 1980. Same period, we qualified for the World Cup for the first time ever. FIFA ranked our national team 5th in the world and, as first timers, we posted a respectable performance at the US'94 World Cup.

Two years later, at the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games, we won gold in the men's football event; Chioma Ajunwa won gold in long jump; the women 4x400 relay team won silver; Mary Onyali Mfr Oly  won bronze in 200m; Falilat Ogunkoya won bronze in 400m; and Duncan Dokiwari completed the outing with a bronze in boxing. That has been the height of our Olympic outing. 

Perhaps we need to revisit the sports and athletes development programmes, organization and management of that era. Our expectation was that we would have built on them for more wins but, from the six medals at Atlanta, we declined very steadily in subsequent Olympiads.

At the Sydney 2000 Games, we returned with half of our medal haul from Atlanta, still, thanks to @Enefiok Udo-Obong and his 4x400m relay team members whose silver later turned to gold, Ruth Ogbeifo who won silver in women 75kg weightlifting and Gloria Alozie for her 100m hurdles silver.

Yet, the arrow pointed down at the Athens 2004 Games in which we returned with just two bronze medals in the men's 4x100 and 4x400 relays.

Given that drop, Beijing 2008 therefore was not too bad with three silver medals -  from Samson Siasia's football team, the women 4x100m relay, Blessing  Okagbare MFR's individual effort in the long jump; and two bronze medals from Chika Chukwumerije in Taekwondo and Mariam Usman in the women 75kg weightlifting.

But again, we failed to consolidate on Beijing, and crashed like a pack of cards at the subsequent London 2012 Games from which we returned with not a single medal.

At the Rio 2O16 Games, we returned with only a bronze medal in the football event, failing in all the other sports, no thanks to Barrister Solomon Dalung  especially for all the brouhaha and shenanigans he brought into our sports.

At the Tokyo 2020 Games, we had a silver by Blessing Oborodudu in wrestling and bronze by Ese Brume -MON in the women's long jump. Then, the Sports Minister got us jubilating to make believe that we had recovered our sports. The pump at Aso Rock Villa was huge, and why not, when there was a time in our football that we christened our Nations Cup third place finish as "golden bronze"?

So, from similar self deceptive propaganda, we apparently went to sleep after Tokyo, probably also believing that, after all, we have Tobi Amusan who emerged world champion with a world record at the World Athletics Championship, Ese Brume, Blessing Oborodudu and some other athletes whom we celebrated, but without effective monitoring, substantial material nor timely technical support for them to build and sustain higher performance ahead of coming events.

Just for a flashback, something interesting happened at the close of the  London 2012 Games. After our failure, the officials needed to cook a narrative to sell to Nigerians and the government, to justify the spend. So, they gathered journalists at a conference centre by the Nigerian House at Stratford and tried to have us deceptively impress it on the public that Nigeria performed well, that we should celebrate that we got into the finals of the 100m metres, that even though we finished eight in the eight lane track, we were 8th in the world; that some athletes recorded their season's and personal best performances at the games, and such other manipulative and face saving dish to the public.

However, in my assessment of the personalities on the high table and their contributions to the development or underdevelopment of our sports, I perceived a little more about the charade in our system. 

Seated there was a former Minister of Sports, Sani Ndanusa. He was also the President of the Nigeria Tennis Federation and had angled to take over the position of President of the NOC. Not only did his sport not qualify any athlete to the Games but, by my reckoning, the game of tennis was steadily dying in the country. 

Save for the CBN and Shell/NNPC Tennis championships which were even declining in seriousness and competitive favour, and recreational tennis by "big men" in places like Ikoyi Club, gone were Ogbe Hard Court, Kaduna Clay Court, our hitherto high quality players in the international circuits and, most painfully, the presence of tennis in our secondary schools. Even today, I still wonder how many schools, colleges and communities in Nigeria have tennis courts, talk less of kits and coaches.

Also on the high table was Habu Gumel. He was and still is the President of the Nigeria Olympic Committee. He was also the President of the Nigeria Volleyball Federation then. His sport did not qualify for the Olympics, even as volleyball was steadily losing visibility in schools and communities across the country.

There was also the General Secretary of the Nigeria Olympic Committee, my friend and brother, Tunde Popoola. He has returned as the General Secretary also after Dr Oladapo had served in between. He was then the President of the Nigeria Hockey Federation. His sport did not qualify for the Olympics and it is difficult, even now, to easily see hockey being played in most schools and communities across the country.

Then there was Patrick Ekeji. He was Director General of the National Sports Commission. We had celebrated him as having seen, experienced and known all in sports, being that he was, at different times, a player and a coach of the Green Eagles, a lecturer at the Nigeria Institute for Sports, and therefore knowledgeable enough, we thought, to turn our sports around.

They were the big men of our sports both at the ministry and at the Olympic Committee. They had double, even multiple positions of power and influence, and  enjoyed all the local and international privileges that came with them, but even in the sports they controlled, they demonstrated no meaningful capacity for the discovery, grooming and nurturing of Olympic quality athletes within the country. 

This is just a snippet, only a tiny underbelly of our sports. The most worrisome is the structure of the national sports establishment itself.

Honestly, we do have some great and passionate civil servants in the sports ministry, but I strongly doubt that we can truly run sports progressively and competitively with a civil service structure?

I am doubtful about the recurring practice in which any politician, without any prior knowledge nor involvement in sports, can be appointed a Sports Minister. Probably, being a political head, it would not have mattered, but it becomes worrisome that he is also coming to work with a Permanent Secretary who, possibly, had served most of his career in the ministries of Solid Minerals, Water Resources, Environment and such sectors unrelated to sports. That leaves us with a situation in which both the political and the administrative/accounting heads have no hands-on experience on the beat, except general pedestrian knowledge.

This can often be worsened by the deployment of directors from various other ministries into departments in the sports ministry, not minding the technical knowledge and experience required, or the redeployment of those who have served and garnered experience from the sports ministry to other ministries.

Perhaps, there is need to consciously re-examine how our sports was run and the performances recorded under the National Sports Commission system in which professionals and sports business technocrats were engaged, in comparison with the Ministry system wherein focus and allegiance is to civil service rules, hierarchy and practices, and not really to the technicalities, psychology and nuances of professional sports management.

The earlier analysis of our modern day Olympic history is so that we can plot the graph of our performance in the past two decades and possibly figure out when, where, how and why the rain started beating us. This is because sports is science, and even now technology, with as much as 80 percent precision input and 20 percent luck and chance. 

When we celebrated Favour Ofili's berth into the 200m finals, for instance, we should have seen that there were six other athletes who consistently had under-22 secs season and personal bests in the field. It was therefore not surprising that she returned 6th in the pack.

As far back as 1996, Chioma Ajunwa won the long jump gold with 7.12m. At the Tokyo 2020 Games, Malaika Mihambo of Germany won the gold with 7m, but at the 2022 European Athletics Championships, she placed second even with 7.12m jump. That should have alerted us that at the coming Olympics one would need at least 6.9m or 7m to be in the medal range.

All that we needed to do was to have consciously and concertedly worked harder on Ese to raise her performance, which could have been achieved through technological analysis, coaching support, medical, nutritional, psychological doctoring and improved welfare. The same regimen could also have gone for Tobi Amusan, Favour Ofili, Blessing Oborodudu, Odunayo Adekuroye and others.

Notice that I did not include any of our male athletes. The sports establishment needs to do a gender analysis of the performance of our athletes in the past ten years or more. I know clearly though that the women have been far more available and formidable. We need to research on the men.

Notice also that we used to have a fair spread of medals across sports. Today, we are no longer talking great about boxing, weightlifting, taekwondo etc. I also hope that with Oborodudu and Adekuroye down, wrestling has also not gone, but things have to be taken to the next level in that sport.

So much had been said about our high performance centres in Abuja and Port Harcourt. Do they still exist? What happens there? How relevant have they been in the preparation of our elite athletes? I ask the same of the Nigeria Institute for Sports. What does it really do for our sports and how potent is it in contribution to our athletes development beyond just awarding diplomas to enable people get promotion in the sports ministries and councils?

There are various other curiosities. I know that athletes can do multiple sports, but while we kept putting pressure on Okagbare to deliver in 100m and 200m in the Olympics, her best international achievements have been in long jump. A silver in the 2008 Olympics and bronze at the 2013 World Championships after she returned last in the London 2012 Games 100m final. 

In later years, she skipped the 100m at the 2015 and 2019 Africa Games, 2018 African Championships and was said to have mistakenly not been registered for the event in the Doha 2019 Championships. How come then that we got her involved for the races in the Tokyo 2020 Games? What has been the final outcome, even for her career?

Should we talk about Annette Echikunwoke? Her story is well known, but this is how Wikipedia describes her: "She was due to represent Nigeria at the 2020 Summer Olympics, but was disqualified due to the negligence of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. She changed allegiance and represented the United States at the 2024 Summer Olympics, winning a silver medal in the event, the first Olympic medal for the U.S. in the women's hammer throw event."

Regrettable and painful, right? The other part of the story is that while almost 10 of the America born Nigeria athletes who suffered from the same negligence were similarly disqualified and sent off the Games Village in Tokyo, Annette said the Nigeria authority did not provide her return ticket to the US. Her parents had to raise funds to send her ticket back home, and she said goodbye to Nigeria.

I recall this story because ahead of the Tokyo Games there was a patriotic surge among Nigerian blooded athletes in the US. They qualified in their different ways for their events and came to join Team Nigeria, but they were let down in the crossfire of the conflict inside the AFN, presided over by the Ministry, and no one was booked. Many of them have also said goodbye to their fatherland.

So, I heard the Sports Minister taking out the poor showing in Paris against the leadership of the sports federations, saying that he will closely monitor their next elections to regulate who gets in. 

That shows he has caught the bug, the usual spell in the sports establishment often concocted for the self preservation of the careerist in their bid to deflect attention from their inadequacies and excesses and also keep the federations in their apron string.

Maybe Enoh should know that the current leaderships of the federations were installed by the former Minister who removed those installed by his predecessor, with the support of the same civil servants around him now. He can as well install his own men, and they will still support him. When another minister comes, he will also remove them and install his own, and they will still support him. They understand very well how to play the game of "soldier go, soldier come."

I don't know if John Enoh will understand or miss the point, but, ranging from poor establishment, administrative and management structure; poor depth, spread and reach of grassroots sports development; dearth of facilities and equipment for mass sports participation especially in our schools, from primary to tertiary levels, and inner communities; inadequate and untutored sports educators; inexistent technical structure for elite/high performance programming; inadequate and improper mode of funding; hugely alienated or disinterested private sector partnership; bad sports politics; open corruption and nepotism; lack of professionalism; to many more cancerous malaise, the issues are actually deeper than the measured briefs he receives.

He has got his first baptism, but I wish he will not act in anger and frustration. He needs to step back to digest what has happened and understand why and how, before acting.

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