Ghana and the Rio Olympics... To be or not to be?
To be or not to be? That is the question on the lips of many sports enthusiasts. Again, what does the Olympic Games really mean to us? To tell you the truth, the greatest sporting event the world can boast, is the International Olympic Games and the sports fraternity in the world acknowledge the significance of the Olympic Games hence every athlete or sport personality aspire to be at the Olympics.
Advertisement
It is second to none and all nations, big or small, make sure their presence is recognised by putting in their all to qualify so that they will be recognised with parades, medal decorations as well as their respective national anthems.
Yes, it is big and massive and the preparations for the Olympic Games must obviously be well-organised. We in this country know what it is to be at the Olympic Games, money or no money! And for that we set aside the required sum of money to prepare our athletes for the event, even though we scarcely find our athletes and others in other disciplines excelling and being heralded by our national anthem "God Bless our Homeland Ghana" in the presence of highly privileged personalities from all over the world.
Only winners of events who are decorated with gold medals stand in the middle of the podium to listen to their national anthems and it is a great pride to be recognised with such honours. Silver and bronze medalists are equally proud to receive the applause of the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the general public, plus those at home watching the event on television. I don't remember the last time we heard our national anthem being played at an Olympic gathering, but surely, we have had a good measure of success, participating, parading and receiving other lower medals.
The IOC encourages all nations to raise their standards to be among the best in the world. However, our efforts seem not to be enough at certain periods of our time, and one of the dark days was when a shake-up was plotted and implemented in the name of politics to overthrow B.T. Baba's Ghana Olympic Committee (GOC).
The IOC noticed the political interference and at once suspended this lovely country of ours, and for a few months that followed the suspension, almost everything, as far as GOC was concerned, came to a halt!
Indeed, we have since then not fully recovered as budding medal winners at the Olympics, even not when the ban was lifted and we had the opportunity to participate in subsequent Games, be they African, Commonwealth and Olympics.
Today, we are counting the days for the commencement of the Rio Olympic Games in Brazil this summer, and the most worried man is Professor Francis Dodoo, the current president of the GOC. He recently came out to spell what looked like the bells of the "doomsday". The Prof. heaped the blame on lack of funds to prepare the athletes for the Rio Games by bemoaning the fate of Ghana and said rather pathetically that it would be unfair for anyone to expect medals from our athletes because the nation had failed to invest in their preparations.
The Prof. who doubles as the President of Ghana Athletics Association, said for the past few years, funding continued to be the bane for preparation to enhance the country’s chances of qualifying for such Games and so it is no wonder, our men and women had performed rather abysmally at such important International Games.
At the last 2012 London Olympic Games and the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, for instance, while some African countries like Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria were commended for their ability to win gold and other medals, the medal table displayed the poor performance of our contingent, a poor reflection to our avowed aim of rubbing shoulders with the best in the world.
That was clearly a sign that we needed to buck up and prepare adequately with lofty plans to do better at subsequent Games. Unfortunately, however, things have not gone well with the general trend taking a nosedive. And at this time that the sports budget has been drastically slashed down, what must be the expectation of the general public and the people who watch us from afar?
This is very sad, as one of the best ways to make the world recognise our existence, like all developing nations, is through international sporting events and it is clear that many notable nations have earned economic recognition through sports. One typical example is Brazil, who have won the FIFA World Cup five times, from 1958 to 2002, and every average citizen who lives around the Brazilian Highlands (the natural name of the Land) can vouch that their amazing economic progress can easily be attributed to their wonderful effort in football at the world level. Before 1958, Brazil was nothing to write home about.
This is the lesson that must touch the hearts of our fiscal authorities, the controllers of our budget, who think that sports is nothing, and that it must be relegated to the last bottom of our budget. To a large extent, my sympathy goes to Prof. Dodoo, but he should have done a thorough search to know what it implies before taking charge of the GOC! The IOC is helping, but the reality is that there is no pot of gold in that position.