If then, sporting is the blacks' game, what should you expect of a country that boasts the largest concentration of black people in the world?
Every analyst should be surprised with Nigeria's woeful accomplishment in sports in spite of her humongous potentials. Why is our performance this abysmal? The perennial problems of poor funding and inadequate preparations of the athletes have always blighted our sports.
The above is self explanatory. So why must every Nigerian be surprised for the poor performance of our athletes?and undermined the potentialities to excel.
We have penchant for failure as a nation when it comes to national interest like sports or athletics but not for individual whose interest is to amass wealth.
Please don't allow that to give you a sleepless night. The leadership in that sector is a sum total of what Nigeria is.
Segun Ogungbemi.
Sent from my iPhone
--Moscow games and the shame of Nigeria's athleticsKAYODE KETEFEThe just concluded 14th World Athletics Championships in Moscow, Russia, which came to an end last Sunday, has once again exposed Nigeria as a nation hounded with underachievement and mediocrity. At the said game, the touted Giant of Africa ended up with just two medals – a silver and a bronze medals- won by the brilliant and talented lady called Blessing Okagbare. Twenty athletes represented the country with the said Okagbare being the only one with a podium finish. At the same competition, Jamaica, a nation of just two million eight hundred thousand people, won six solid gold medals, in addition to other silver and bronze medals!By some inexplicable genetic constitution and biological propensity, sporting activities like track and field events are black man's game. That for instance explains why all those people who have held 100m records in 100m since the start of the Olympic in 1896 have all been black men (and women) - right from the first sprint champion Tom Burke of the United States of America to the incumbent champion, Usain Bolt of Jamaica.No white person, Asian or any athlete save those of West African origin has ever been crowned an Olympic or world champion in the 100m sprint. What obtains in the sprint essentially holds true to a lesser degree in most of the other track and field events.If then, sporting is the blacks' game, what should you expect of a country that boasts the largest concentration of black people in the world? Every analyst should be surprised with Nigeria's woeful accomplishment in sports in spite of her humongous potentials.Historically, our performances in the Olympics call for serious soul-searching.Nigeria has participated in every summer Olympics game since 1952 when she was first represented to the last one held last year in London. The only time the country was missing at the Olympics was in 1976 when the nation boycotted the games. Nojeem Maiyegun won the first medal for Nigeria at the 1964 games in Tokyo by bagging a bronze medal in boxing in the Men's light middleweight category.Altogether Nigeria has won a meager 23 medals for her adventures in the past 61 years of the participation at the Olympics. These comprise 3 gold, 8 silver and 12 bronzes. This medal profile was last updated at the Beijing Olympic in 2008 as the contingent from the last edition in London returned empty handed. It is absolutely saddening that the record of Jamaica at the last Olympic alone, (four gold, four silver four bronze) was better than Nigeria's all time 61-year record at the games! Jamaica all-time accumulations amounted to whopping 67 medals comprising, 17 gold, 30 silver and 20 bronzes. Yet the ratio of its population to Nigeria is just about 1: 60 (that is one over sixty of the Nigerian population). Jamaica consisted mainly of descendants of people taken away from this same West Africa!The performance of the country at the World Athletics Championship (WAC) which had its 14th edition completed last Sunday was even worse. Nigeria got her first medal in the International Amateur Athletic Federation-organised WAC through Ajayi Agbebaku, who bagged a bronze at the game held in Helsinki, Finland in 1983. From that time till the just concluded WAC, Nigeria has won only 8 medals comprising four silver and four bronzes and not a single gold. In this year WAC alone, Jamaica scooped 6 gold to outclass what Nigeria has achieved since 1983!Why is our performance this abysmal? The perennial problems of poor funding and inadequate preparations of the athletes have always blighted our sports.and undermined the potentialities to excel.We don't have enough funds to develop sports but we have enough resources to maintain the highest paid legislators in the world.The executives including the governors and chairmen of local government councils, already bloated with overpayment, nonetheless get mouth-watering allocations every month in the name of security votes – a meaningless profligacy when sporting infrastructure are either lacking or obsolete in most parts of the country.Ironically, a contributory factor to poor performance of the Nigerian to the just concluded WAC was the cancellation of the scheduled two-week camping for the athletes for strenuous training and conditioning before the competition. Reason? There is no fund! The Athletics Federation of Nigeria alleged that National Sports Commission had not release funds to it. Thus the country took the athletes to the games without a single day of camping!Even for the comparative little funds that are sunk into the sport, lack of effective planning for sport development, has made gains to be suboptimal.The country never takes care of her athletes – a fact which has made some of them like Gloria Alozie, Francis Obikwelu and Christine Ohuruogu to switch allegiance by changing their nationality to Spain, Portugal and Britain respectively.Even one of athletes that competed in the Moscow games, Gloria Asumnu, was reported in the dailies to have regretted her decision to compete for the country as a result of lack of care and poor attention from the Nigerian sporting authorities.Certainly, for Nigeria to achieve excellence in sport, our sporting culture has to change.
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.