Kofi Owusu Aduonum
21 August 2008
opinion
When in 1894, Pierre Fredy Baron de Coubertin founded the Olympics, the main motive was for all nations to feel proud by merely participating, but this is no more the case. In recent years the medals table of the quadrennial Olympics has become one of the dominant measures (like economic and military), of a country's might on the global scene, with national pride taking centre stage.
It might have seemed like patriotism gone wild when two members of Georgia's men's beach-volleyball team stitched the nicknames "Geor" and "Gia" onto their uniforms, spelling out the name of their team's besieged nation. But there's a twist: neither of the players is Georgian by birth. Renato Gomes and Jorge Terceiro are towering Brazilian imports recruited by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili for the sole purpose of playing for his country.
More athletes than ever are competing in Beijing under flags (and, in many cases, names) different from the ones under which they were born, bending the very notion of national identity. For some observers, this growing trend is a symbol of how sports transcends national borders, giving athletes a chance to escape hardship, train with better coaches, or compete in sports that are saturated with talent back home.
For others, including in some cases, the Olympics' governing body, it can be a violation of the very spirit of the games. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) now requires a three-year waiting period between the time an athlete gets citizenship in a country and the time he or she can compete on its Olympic team. "What is not legitimate," Jacques Rogge, the IOC chief, said in 2004, "is when an athlete sells himself as a mercenary."
The gold medalists in recruiting foreign-born athletes are Qatar and Bahrain, tiny oil-rich Gulf states that have poached top runners from Kenya, Morocco, and Ethiopia. The effort took off in the 1990s, when Qatar began importing Bulgarian weight lifters, one of whom, Angel Popov, won a bronze medal in the 2000 Olympics under his adopted Arab name, Saif Saeed Asaad.
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