From Rio To Tokyo

The Games are over for another four years. As everyone heads home, it is time for counting the costs and thinking of what might have been.  One thing is clear: the price tag of $4.6 billion may not have been a bargain for Brazil’s underclass.

By and large, however, most participating countries came away apparently satisfied with the outcome as far as medals count goes. Four years ago, when I was in a similar lookback mode, I wondered why it was that African countries could only manage just a handful of medals. (“If it was that easy, why weren’t you there yourself running, jumping, diving or whatever?) This is elite territory, friends, where only angels dare. The rest of us must just sit, watch, and enjoy and wonder how is it that only a few can attain Olympian glory. The answer, I thought then, as most others do, principally lie in the genes.

          If genes are the likely key, why then do Africans not perform as well as the Jamaicans, for example? Where Jamaica’s 2.8 million people produce 11 medals in 2016, Africa, with a population of 1.2 billion, should have netted 4714. Ridiculous, of course, since only about 900, in total, are typically up for grabs. More sensibly, the approximately 364 million people living in the western African region, where most Jamaicans have their roots, should have been able to procure a decent haul of a few sprint medals at least. None there were. Nigeria, after a shambolic, not to say farcical entrance, managed to look in at all its football fixtures coming away with the bronze, slim pickings for a nation of 187 million. Having said all that though, it is somewhat of a relief that Africa is not the worst underachiever. India (2 medals, Rio 2016) carries the bucket. So, a big population is not necessarily an advantage, nor is a small one necessarily the opposite. Population, therefore, is not the key, as China has experienced, to its embarrassment this time, when it came third, behind GB. Heads might roll in the Middle Kingdom.

What is it then, if not genetics and/or population number? Perhaps it is money? Money, we know, talks. But evidently it runs, jumps and lifts as well. Medal positions reveal a clear dependence on national income: by and large, the higher the gross national income, or GNI, the more medals a country bags. This is true for most, except among the four countries with the highest medals count. China disrupted the trend among this gang of four, somewhat, when, in 2012 it carried off a haul much bigger than its $7500 GNI would have predicted. At the low end of the GNI scale Jamaica (again) disrupts, when its purchasing power of only $6500 GNI should, by rights, have procured a more meagre harvest.

The island won big, however. And this was not just a 2012 fluke. They have been doing it for years and have repeated the feat again at Rio 2016. Because of this, people have come up with all kinds of explanations why they do so well, particularly in the sprint events where they excel so spectacularly. Genetics, slavery, diet and even schooling have all been invoked as potential explanations for Jamaican performance, not only in the popular press but also among academics as well. The narrative can be summarized something like so: Jamaican sprinters are descendants of African slaves forced from their ancestral lands, transported under the appalling conditions of the “middle passage,” to the Caribbean. Here, they had to endure the hardships of plantation slavery. In this school of hard knocks only the very strong, genetically endowed, survived. That supposed survivor gene was nimble too, enough to encrypt in its inheritors the desire, the will and the energy to revolt against the slave masters. Those Jamaicans of old had grabbed their freedom, and become “Maroons” who, in the latter part of the 18^th century, occupied the central mountain region of the island. The English, who had wrested the island from the Spaniards, were never able to defeat the Maroons in frontal combat, but instead, used perfidy to get them to lay down their arms. Most of the Maroons were subsequently transported to Nova Scotia in Atlantic Canada. Those who remained on the island thrived on a diet of yams that boosted their considerable genetic endowment, it is claimed. Many still live there in a parish called Trelawney where the modern-day Maroon child starts running as soon as he or she gets out of the cradle. Once in school, they follow a regimen of training that culminates, for the cream, in the annual “Champs” secondary schools sports competition.

And that is how they come to win. Orlando Patterson’s  recent essay in the New York Times goes over this territory well but he points out also that one aspect of Britain’s colonial policy in the 1920’s was the introduction of  public health measures that infused wellbeing into the Jamaican body frame that has sustained till today.

Now cut and paste this picture onto the Sierra Leone landscape, for example: Some of the slaves taken to the Caribbean almost certainly originated from that country. It is more than likely some survived to contribute to the stock that became Maroon freedom fighters, first against the Spanish and then the English. When the latter gained ascendancy, they shipped the most bolshie of the lot to Nova Scotia in 1796; then in 1800, 550 of the least tractable were transported again, now to the newly-established refuge for African slaves, Sierra Leone, where they were settled in Maroon Town on the western side of the infant city of Freetown. Maroon Town Church, Trelawney Street and the former Westmoreland Street are just a few of the relics of this reverse migration that brought descendants right back to the place from which their forebears had been taken.

Maroon descendants still live there, the genes still circulating. They, too, eat yam as an important part of a diet in which the tuber has almost spiritual significance. “If you yams white, cobba am,” a saying goes*. The children go to school and, significantly, participate in sport, culminating in the annual secondary schools competition, the Sierra Leone equivalent of “Champs.”

Why do Sierra Leoneans not win medals, then? Why don’t they even qualify? Sure the GNI is low (very low) but Maroon blood runs in their veins and they do everything else that a bona fide Maroon would do. And yes, they also have the Champs, named the Annual Secondary Schools Sports, an event that should be the entry ticket for athletes who aim to perform at the higher level. But what has been happening, instead? The emphasis, sadly, appears to be elsewhere.

But to truly understand the calamitous status of athletics in that country, all we have to do is observe the headlines that blaze across newspapers at the beginning of March, each year, the time when the competition takes place. A couple of direct quotes are illustrative.

“As Inter-Sec ends today… Kids Advocacy Network call for peace…”

“…assistant Director of PHE (Physical Health Education) of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has disclosed that they hope to have a successful sports meet this year that will be free from violence…”

You get the drift? One would be forgiven if one asked, “Do they have the right priorities?”

 Tell Fren Tru

*Translation: Do not be showy when you have success.