London 2012 Summer Olympics (article continued)

A lot happened during this year’s Olympics games. The games started 2 days before the actual opening ceremony (July 27th) with preliminary matches for the Women and Men’s football respectively. From that first event till the very last day (August 12th), records were being broken, new world records were being set and emotions were running sky high. Like Cristiane Rozeira de Souza Silva of the Brazil’s women’s football team who set the record for the most goals scored by a woman in the Olympics when she scored her 11th Olympic goal on the 25th of July.

Her record was closely followed by South Korean team that not only set a new world record for men’s Archery competition but also produced the individual world record (by Im Dong-Hyun - legally blind competitor) of 699 points for 72 arrows on the day of the opening ceremony. Let’s not forget the athletes that got disqualified and sent home for tweeting unpleasant comments about other competing athletes and the many drug-tests to ensure athletes were not depending on performance enhancement drugs. But what people were looking forward to was which country would go home with the most medals and if their country would get medals in the particular sports they participated in.

As a Nigerian, I was proud to see we had our first ever Kayak representative (Jonathan Akinyemi) and a Basketball team in addition to the usual squads of athletes for athletics, wrestling, Taekwando, Boxing, Table Tennis and weightlifting categories. Most of our athletes held great promise (like Blessing Okagbare who was Africa’s fastest female athlete in the 100m category), but in the end, we were left a tad bit disappointed as none of our finest athletes were able to clench a single medal in this year’s Summer Olympics.

Nigerians vented their disappointment through various social media but little did we know we would have a second chance with the just concluded London 2012 Para-Olympics. We won 13 medals (6 gold, 5 silver and 2 bronze) in Power lifting and set new world records through athletes such as Yakubu Adosokan, Esther Oyema, Joy Onaolapo and Folashade Oluwafemiayo. (more on this later). Too bad we can’t participate in the London 2012 Winter Olympics since we experience no winter season in Nigeria.

Now back to the London 2012 Summer Games. Our basketball didn’t do too badly, despite the record breaking match played against the USA. While the American team made the record of the most points ever scored in an Olympics basketball game, Nigeria made the record of the highest scores ever earned by an African Basketball team in an Olympic match.

Don’t forget we also had player with the second highest score by an individual (Ike Diogu-27points) in that particular game even though an American Player (Carmelo Anthony -37points) broke the former Olympic record of the most points scored by an individual which was set in 1988 by a Brazilian player ( -31points). What I hated most was when some of the athletes suddenly began admitting that they were not home based players and blaming their poor performance on the poor support from the Nigerian government as if that would excuse their failure in securing a gold medal.

From what I saw, the athletes who did exceedingly well in the games were people who had a personal stake in their success like Michael Phelps, Usain Bolts and even 16-year old Shiwen Ye. Anyway, like I said on twitter, we (Nigerians) should be grateful we even had a team to represent the country at such an international sporting event.