Bisi Lawrence
28 August 2008
opinion
WITH the unacceptable human rights record of China, particularly the situation of Tibet, one should wonder why the United States, as the leading nation of the West, agreed to the choice of China to host the recent Olympic Games
It would have been consistent with the former stance of boycott, to stay away as they did from Moscow in 1980. But times have changed and so must attitudes and strategies, even if policies are thus somewhat abraded.
In the past three decades, China has continued to loom large into the consciousness of other nations with bold, brash steps of a country that has truly arrived. The evidence abounds in the latest area for assessing human advancement, and that is IT - Information Technology.
The West has had to accept that there is a new player in the field, who has claimed its own patch and cannot be ignored as a rival. And yet, so little is known about that contestant apart from its awesome size and the topside of a monumental past shrouded behind the inscrutable face of its antiquity.
The thinking of the West might have been that in hosting the Olympics, China would; at least, reveal an appreciable amount of her hidden parts like, for instance, the motivations of her philosophy, or the projection of her ideologies. Well, the Beijing Olympics have come and gone, as they say, and what have we discovered?
Well. If you ask me, nothing! Oh, there was confirmation of some firm perceptions, but we were favoured with no discoveries. We were already aware of the highly regimented system of life and living in a country of more than one-third of humanity, a real world of its own, which not only survived, but also thrived in more than three decades of isolation in which it reveled before shouldering its way out to face the rest of the world, when it was good and ready.
We already knew that there was development of an untold intensity in technology and science, which probed into and improved the ancient stock of knowledge rather than impair its integrity. Thus we expected, though we were almost stunned all the same, by the grandest fireworks display the world has ever seen, both at the opening and the closing ceremonies.
The Olympic Games was named after the mountain in which the Ancient Greeks believed their gods resided. That is where your heart rose at the beginning of each Olympiad occasion -way up high on a mountain of expectations and speculations.
It stayed there through the breathtaking moments of elation and disappointment, and the tide of astonishment or vindication. It did not matter whether you were involved at no higher point of participation than that of a grounds man in an arena, or one of the army of technicians, or hordes of media men.
The excitement sat on your shoulders more, of course, if you were a competitor or an umpire, a referee or a judge. But it is all a matter of the intensity of your involvement. There was the commonality of interest, if not objective, that brought you together with other people during the day, and the social meetings in the evening. You embraced new friendships and experienced the fresh vistas related to different climes of distant peoples, suddenly made familiar by contact.
The Games thus transcends the physical contention in the arena. It becomes a contest of policies and postures, in which ideas compete with ways of life. The Chinese have done rather well, all considered, and it seems to stick in the craw of the Americans.
That is why there have been all those snide remarks about the child who sang her way into the hearts of millions at Opening Ceremony but, we are informed, using another child's voice. Who cares? Whose voice sang in the award-winning movie,
"My Fair Lady"? And all that noise about a fourteen-year old winning the Gymnastics title instead of a sixteen-year old and above, could have been hailed as an example of a prodigy exposition if the champion had been an American. All the same, the mud-slinging of the Americans was interspersed by their grudging admission of the magnificence of the Chinese presentation.
The Games has always been a platform for the advertisement and campaign for new products, new plays and even new political movements in the olden days. It still is today in some ways, and China washed the eyes of the world in colour mingled with panache. Someone once said Africa appreciates colour, but the Orient understands it.
The Beijing Games showed off that knowledge. If even the host had won just a modest number of medals, the spectacular quality of the show would have been enough to remember, but the haul of medals grabbed by China left all other nations panting far behind.
Of course, we are talking here of Gold medals, the number of which normally determined the position of the competing nations, before the other medals were taken into the reckoning.
But as China's Gold medals increased, so was more emphasis placed on the over-all number of medals in which the United Sates led the others.
No one was fazed by that shift which was directed to the inconsequential advantage of the US of A. This was simply not their year.
Imagine a nation with the American antecedents in sports dropping the baton all over the tracks in the relays. Simply disgraceful! But there is hardly little they would have achieved against the "Thunder" Bolt and his cohorts.
They would most probably have had what they did to other people in various arenas over the years, also done to them before the whole world under "The Bird's Nest".
That sounds callous, but I do sincerely sympathize with the United States of America whose participation has created legends and enriched the lore that has sustained and beautified the Olympics through the years. They can only come back big-time at the next Olympics in London.
Likewise, my heart goes out to those who were confronted by any dreadful disappointment in Beijing, including our own four-by-one- hundred relay team who were let down by our notorious baton-change ability... or should one say "disability"?
The most vexatious part of it all was the conspiracy to daub Emedolu a saboteur and "hang" him. I must protest. It is an indictment that has no evidence in fact, or merit in presentation. What we are supposed to believe is that this man had been sweating his soul out for the purpose of trading the personal glory he would have achieved, for the tremendous injury he wanted to inflict on his comrades and country? Why would he want to do that?
The precipitate manner in which the officials arrived at that judgment, coupled with its pronouncement away from home, is on all fours with the equally rash way in which they made the announcement of the dissolution of the sports associations.
The cover-up for their own incompetence and abysmal failure must fail when the Chairmen of the associations begin to speak out. They have always been reticent in the past, but now they must speak out. In the first place, who selected, and appointed, most of the members of the panels, and based upon what criteria?
Did they not even once appoint Lucky Igbinedion, when he was a State Governor, as the Chairman of the Boxing Association, though it was apparent that the poor man did not know the difference between the right glove and the left? And they now dare to mount the seat of judgment over others to whose failure they massively contributed?
Dr. Amos Adamu and his bunch of bunglers cannot shift the blame for the poor performance of the Nigerian contingent to Beijing on anyone else but themselves, and they know it. They were banking on the good fortune of one or two superlative results in the competitions to douse the raging resentment against them in the hearts of Nigerians. And it has always worked for them But not this time. Not even the stupendous performance of Samson Siasia and his "paladins" could make it work. It is a well-known fact that their contribution to that silver medal was even minimal. They have to be brought out to face the music, and this page will extend itself to any effort that is bent on bringing these shameless people to book.
The Committee on Sports in the National Assembly should begin a sincere investigation into the circumstances of the decline in our sports right away.
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