Olympics: Not close and still no cigar

The three-week sporting extravaganza that is the Summer Olympics ended yesterday. Among other things we discovered that nearly 15 years later, the Spice Girls still sing. We may have to modify ‘Girl Power’ to ‘Woman Power’ but they still had the moves. Regionally, Stephen Kiprotich gave Uganda a gold in the marathon while David Rudisha got his gold for Kenya by breaking the 800m world record. As usual Team Rwanda returned the way they had left, sans medailles. Not even one of them got within range of the medals [say within the top 10] of any competition. The BBC did however give them a social media gold for a picture showing them waiting for a bus. The social media world loved the picture of the athletes waiting for their commute. Unfortunately being photogenic is not yet an Olympic sport and so it was the empty handed return home. An article from The Economist had a chart that showed the highest achieving nations in the Olympics based on medal haul, number of athletes and number of Olympics attended as of 2008. The top 2 were communist states that no longer exist, the Democratic Republic of Germany [East Germany] and the Soviet Union, followed by the United States of America. Rwanda fell under the list of ‘also rans’, that is to say, we have never won a medal. Ever. Rwanda as a country does well in many fields and has come a long way over the years but we don’t do well on the global sports stage. We are the only country in the East African Community never to win a medal at the summer Olympics. For those of you interested in the complex world of DRC – Rwanda relations, for all our differences, we share a border, had the same colonizer and we both have the dubious distinction of never having won a medal at the Olympics. The athletes are not to blame. Most are not even sure of their Olympic ticket until the last month to the event and I have never heard of Olympic trials to select the country’s best athletes in their respective fields.In essence, they are arbitrarily chosen by their federations and informed that they’re going to compete on the worldwide stage at the very last moment against competitors who have been training for their events for at least 5 years while competing against the top contenders in their fields. The sporting contest can never be fair for Rwanda’s representatives. It’s almost like sending an under-trained soldier to battle with a razor blade. The under-trained and ad hoc nature of our Olympic team is not a recent or even secret thing. The Olympic Committee must surely be aware of this as they have done the same thing every summer Olympics. It’s a formula that never varies. Wait for wildcard qualifications, pick athletes, scramble for funding, leave athletes to train on their own and hope for the best. Similarly, the results never vary. Yesterday was yet another closing ceremony where we reveled in the achievements of others.