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Our Olympic dream
By MajiriOghene Bob
For us to get to the bottom of this whole Olympic business,
we may have to jettison the ordinary explanation that the Olympics were
originally pagan festivals held every four years in honour of certain
deities. Of course we cannot deny that there were pagan rites associated
with the games: women were bared and this was partly because the games
were essentially a manly thing and competitions were conducted among stark
naked men. But beyond this seeming trivial composition of the games, the
Olympics had a philosophy. Athletes competed to showcase an individual
competitive spirit devoid of the interference and involvement of the government.
All that the government did was provide gymnasiums and make it a compulsory
part of a boy’s education to participate in rigorous exercises under
strict, sometimes severe conditions. Participation in these exercises
produced outstanding physical ability and mental dedication which were
seen as an index of the intellectual morphology of the competitor.
Thus, the overwhelming dogma that greatly shaped the
Olympiads was the dogma that for you to detect a healthy mind, you had to look
for one in a very healthy body. The cultivation of a mind was as important to
the ancient Greeks as the cultivation of the body. This was because it was felt
that the body was a mirror that reflected the quality of an individual’s
mind: doctors tell you that during exercises, much of the blood which
circulates around the brain has two uses: as a flushing device and as food for the
brain. If you pause awhile and reflect on some of the athletes that have
competed so far in the track and field events and in some of the indoor
activities of the present Olympiad, you may get a clue to what I try to express
here.
The Olympics were a celebration of an individual’s
competitive spirit and of the individuality. Athletes used to compete at the
Olympic pageant in order to showcase their physical prowess and to use their
brains constructively and manipulate and drive the human body to achieve
spectacular results. All that these athletes campaigned for was glory and
achievement as individuals (related to the Greek ideal of excellence called
‘arête’). It was when these victors began to enjoy largesse
from their communities in the form of free meals for the rest of their lives,
tax cuts that the Olympics ‘begame’ an indispensable tool for the
expression of nationalism, an epitome of socio-political rivalries among
nations-wars were still being fought on the Olympic field of sport and revelry
but they were wars fought without the usual uniform of warfare.
These days, nations send their people to the Olympics. They
do not, however, send their people to the Olympics just because they want to
show to the world how much they can jump, run or swim. Today, nations go to the
Olympics to make bold statements and advertise the progresses made in the
development of their people. There were some journals I read recently
concerning how the United States cultivate their swimmers: they put their
swimmers through simulated waves and a current so strong that when they
encounter a waveless one in a competitive pool, they seem to glide through it
like fishes do in their natural habitat. This is why a nineteen year old as the
American, Michael Phelps beats all other comers and predicts the number of gold
medals he could garner. The way they do it makes you feel that the celebrations
had been rehearsed before the commencement of the games. Other countries like
Nigeria (my country) have people who assume that they can improve on their
standard of competitive swimming by taking athletes to the River Niger for
training sessions. This is a little too crude a manner of thinking.
Today’s world and the people who live in it today are too far advanced
for this : some of them already have solutions for the problems they are yet to
encounter in the next decade. Some have began to clone humans and animals
surreptitiously and a lot of the foods that we eat these days are genetically
cultivated. Recently, it was in the news that the wealthiest of the people of
the civilized world have started buying plots of land in outer space and mostly
on the moon as preparation for the days when the rumoured expansion of the
earth will cease.
For most of us here in Nigeria, especially sports enthusiasts
like me, our inability to win any medals so far has been one big embarrassment.
I watch with envy as developing nations like China reap the fruits of a
commitment and an investment that committed leaders had put in place over the
years. I was only a little boy in the seventies and at that time China’s
Mao Tse-tung spearheaded a comprehensive sports programme that compulsorily
involved adolescents. In one of those magazines of theirs called ‘China
Pictorial, I actually saw a five year old fiddling with rubber weights. What
the fascination was for me was that even with that semi-toddler, a competitive
spirit and a zeal to compete and excel had been instilled at that tender age.
Why then should it surprise us greatly that China scoops medals at the games
with ‘the greatest of ease’?
For me, I thought we were a bunch of jokers to really assume
that we would actually go to the Olympics and gather ten, a whooping ten gold
medals. That we have not won any gold medal in this edition of the Olympics is
one other lesson today in international politics: it is that you do not take
any nation for granted in the formulation of your nation’s policies. We
seem to have taken the decision to win ten gold medals thinking that other
nations who had prepared to win twenty gold would go to sleep and let us catch
our fun. But nobody has ever planted rice and reaped garlic. And even if that
were to happen, we may think that the reaping of garlic when you planted rice
could be one of those things that can be explained away. But the fact is,
Nigeria is not planting and is not really serious about planting. We
concentrate mostly on the short term monetized approach to the development of
the individual rather than dreaming a dream or having a vision first. Do we not
all know it today that it was because one Nigerian leader invested massively in
free education that most Nigerians were able to go to school and may now
compete with the rest of the world on the same academic podium? Awolowo’s
dream and vision of free education for all is what translated in the western
part of Nigeria’s development in western education. It is the same thing
with sports. No focused governments anywhere in the world should spend as much
as one hundred and sixty million talking about its image. This sort of money
is usually invested in programmes that concentrate mostly on the cultivation
of the body and minds of young people. This is what other countries that are
winning medals at the Olympics have done and this is what they have come to say
at the games.
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