OLYMPIC SUCCESS, TOTALLY HOMEGROWN

By Enefiok Udo-Obong

The echoes of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games are still sounding as the country takes stock of her performances over the past three weeks of the global sporting fiesta. The post -mortem by the sporting public is anything but complimentary but a lot owes to the fact that as the adage goes, hindsight has 20/20 vision.

Nigerians had set high hopes in the team expecting more than the two medals the team returned with. Just on the eve of the Games, the Nigerian senior men’s basketball team, D’Tigers loaded with players born in America but of Nigerian descent, defeated the USA in a friendly competition. While a lot of people were excited about this and saw it as a great leap in the progress of our basketball, others were less convinced, insisting that a group of people assembled together in the USA and developed in the US did not reflect the development (or lack of it) of Nigerian basketball.

In fact, this ‘amalgamation’ of American players with any root to Nigeria was so lopsided that not even one player from the Nigerian basketball league made the team. Rather than show the growth of Nigerian basketball, it actually reflected its death. The same applies to the female team in basketball. Participating in only their second Olympic Games, the was team was no different from the men. It was a collection of players that their only affiliation to Nigeria may have been by their ancestral roots. The situation was the same in the team’s first Olympics in 2004 in Athens, Greece that when having a meeting with the athletes, the then Minister of Sport, Musa Mohammed, after listening to problems from the female basketball players turned to his Director of Sports, Patrick Ekeji and asked, “I thought this was the Nigerian Team. But I do not understand them at all. They are all speaking like Americans. Can someone explain to me what they all said?” Whether the minister was serious or joking, only he could tell but the message was that these athletes were not developed at home at all.

But basketball has not been the only sport to go this route of fishing for ready-made foreign athletes with a dint of Nigerian blood to compete for Team Nigeria. Athletics in Nigeria was a big culprit in this regard. In the past decade, especially during the Chief Solomon Ogba-led AFN, it was commonplace to see a lot of American-Nigerians don the national colours. As a matter of fact it sometimes reached the heights of non-Nigerians given express passports to compete as Nigerians. This mercenary policy hit the heights during the Glasgow Commonwealth Games where some athletes who had never ever been to Nigeria and some not even Nigerians were given Nigerian passports and flew straight from the USA to Scotland to represent Nigeria even without ever stepping on Nigerian soil. Americans like Monzavous Edwards, Mark Jelks, Robert Simmons, Tyron Akins, Dominique Duncan and Nichole Denby joined other Nigerian-Americans like Gloria Asumnu, Regina George, Nneka Okwelogu and Ugonna Ndu to deny Nigerian that had trained so hard and were not given equal opportunity to represent their nation proudly. After the Commonwealth Games, a couple of the American athletes ‘confessed’ to not being Nigerians and only being paid to compete for Nigeria. Some were given ‘new’ middle names like Weyinmi, Amaju, etc when their passports were given to them.

Some other sports have been guilty of this too. Though not in going as bad as the Athletics Federation of Nigeria did (in bringing absolutely non Nigerians and giving them Nigerian passports), some other sports have brought in Nigerians in diaspora to compete for them at the Games. Canoeing, Kayaking and recently gymnastics are just some examples. This is by no means illegal or wrong but it is not a reflection of the development of the sport in our country. The national federations of canoeing, kayaking and gymnastics cannot feel pride in any work they have done to deserve to be at the Games. The development of their sports is non-existent back at home and all they have succeeded in doing is scouting for anybody worldwide that has a Nigerian name to come and compete for the country and justify whatever support their federation is given. It must be pointed out that most times, these ‘prodigal Nigerians’ only compete for the nation when they see their chances fail in competing or qualifying for their ‘preferred countries’.

But as the basketball teams’ failure in Tokyo would tell you (the teams, both the male and female teams, failed to win even a single game at the Olympics), these lazy and short cut route to sporting success always end abysmally. If we go down to history, Nigeria’s Olympic successes and sporting successes in general have always been homegrown. All our Olympic medalists have been homegrown, so have the majority of our sporting teams that have experienced some sort of success. The Nigerian U-17 and U20 football teams were a fearful team in world football till we started inviting ‘European-born’ Nigerians into the teams. Even our female soccer team lost its invincibility in Africa when we felt that imported players and officials from Europe were better equipped than the home bred ones.

Our sporting success must come from well-planned strategies from the grassroots level, carefully implemented programmes, patient training and developmental activities, improvement of coaches’ knowledge and provision of facilities, and also adequate investment in the sporting ecosystem.

No matter how well we scout or poach athletes developed in other countries or climes, our success would come from homegrown products.

Ese Brume and Blessing Oborududu demonstrated that quite vocally in Tokyo.