‘Johnny come lately’ on the Olympics

My first memories of the Olympics are from 1988. As a ten year old, I strongly believed that the world was made up of two kinds of people; good people and bad people. The good people went to heaven and bad people went to hell; period. All those years back as the action unfolded in Seoul South Korea, it was very clear to me who was going to heaven and who would burn in hell.The 100m dash that has forever been the showpiece event of the summer games pitted an American darling and an allegedly drugged up Jamaican born Canadian against each other. All church going folks cheered for the American but the dark side prevailed.The Canadian won in world record time; 9.79 seconds! The other athletes on the track that day claimed that the breeze that followed Ben Johnson was akin to feeling a taxiing aeroplane go by! Carl Lewis, the American, looked on dumbfounded when he finished second in 9.92 seconds although he had also broken the then world record of 9.95, I too felt cheated.Drug tests were done and good did triumph over evil eventually, the rest is history as they say.From that moment on I was eternally hooked. Every four years like the other billion viewers on TV I look forward to the summer Olympics. As an African, much as I love sport the winter Olympic Games holds no allure for me. The closest I come to having any interest is watching the movie “cool running” end of story.This year the honour of hosting the games of the 30th Olympiad went to London, a city steeped in culture and history. The cosmopolitan nature of this city is event in the number of nationalities that call it home.For two weeks from July 27 to August 12, 2012, it will be home to an estimated 10,500 of the world’s finest athletes from 204 nations and the bill please? USD 14.46 Billion, thank you!The last time London hosted the Olympic Games was 1948 and the catchphrase then as is now was “austerity”. Things were so tight athletes had to bring their own food. The game will forever be remembered for the exploits of the “flying housewife” 30-year old Fanny-Blankers Coen, a mother of three from the Netherlands who stunned the world with her four gold medal performances. It could have been more but women were limited to three individual events back then. Her fourth gold medal was in 4X100m relay.The Olympic Games have always been a platform of individual human endeavour and international political jousting. From the ancient games of 776BC to 393AD held in Olympia, Greece to the modern games of 1896 to date, little has changed. Legends abound of the great athletes of ages gone by; in my own time I have heard of Jesse Owens, a black American whose hand Adolf Hitler could not shake even after he won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin summer Olympic Games.Forty years later, Nadia Comaneci a Romanian 14-year old owned the world with her perfect scores in the gymnastics uneven bars event, something the organisers of the 1976 Montreal Olympics had not anticipated as the score boards could not display scores of 10.00 and the judges had to settle for 1.00 instead.The cold war politics of the 80’s were captured in Olympic history by the boycotts by different nations of the 1980 Moscow and the 1984 Los Angeles games respectively. Through incidents like these, the games continue to be a mirror of society; a reflection of the human condition. More recently after years of political tensions between the two Koreas, North and South appeared under one flag in the 2000 Sydney Olympics – a sign of a mutual desire for peaceful relations.Perhaps nothing embodies the idealism of the Olympics like the words of Pierre de Fredy, Baron de Coubertin the founder of the International Olympic Committee and purported father of the modern Olympic games. He is quoted thus; L’important dans la vie ce n’est point le triomphe, mais le combat, l’essentiel ce n’est pas d’avoir vaincu mais de s’être bien battu. This can be translated as “The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”This is the foundation of the Olympic spirit. The tenets of which are friendship, solidarity and fair play.While the big picture is about defining the world’s best athletes and creating legends such as Michael Phelps the American swimmer with a career studded with twenty Olympic medals, sixteen of which Gold; there is also room for the likes of Jackson Niyomugabo, the Rwandan swimmer who competed in the 50m free style. A self taught swimmer, he relies on a book for coaching. He finished fourth in his heat and did not make the semi-finals of the qualifying rounds. He did, however, represent aspirations of 11 million Rwandans for 28.38 seconds in that gigantic swimming pool in London. He flew the flag, he registered a personal best time and that counts for something. He is Rwanda’s fastest swimmer and he showed that in front of a billion TV viewers; make of it what you will.It’s eight Olympiads that Rwanda has participated in to date and we still await our first medal outside the Paralympics. There is no shame in that. The flag flies high, it’s more than a numbers game; even India, a nation of more than 1.2 billion people has only managed one bronze so far in London!Its early days yet, who knows what Rwamagana boy Adrien Niyonshuti has in store for Rwanda and the world come the cross country cycling event on Sunday August 12?

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‘Johnny come lately’ on the Olympics