Nigeria Content Online

The
19th edition of the Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi, India has
come and gone leaving different memories for different people. The
Games earlier dogged by controversies about the readiness of the host
to stage a befitting event soon fizzled out with the games eventually
turning out to be one of best organised Games in recent times.

Apart from the
fact that three Nigerian athletes tested positive for banned
substances, Team Nigeria had a wonderful outing. The trio, Damola
Osayomi, Gabriel Okon and Folashade Abugan, are currently awaiting the
IAAF verdict on the length of their respective bans.

In the midst of all
this, the country broke new marks in some sports like wrestling which
is not regarded as a stronghold, but failed to maintain a grip on some
others like boxing and table tennis.

With a compact team
competing in just seven sports, Nigeria won 11 gold, 8 silver and 14
bronze medals to finish ninth on the final medal table thus emerging as
the third best African team.

With this success
recorded, many have advocated for a proactive approach towards
preparing for the All African Games scheduled for Maputo next year and
the 2012 London Olympics.

Paul Obodoechina,
an athletics coach, who was part of the Nigerian contingent to the
first Youth Olympics held in Singapore, is pleased with our performance.

“It was a good
performance, no doubt but we must not be carried away by the success
story and fail to realise that greater challenges lie ahead. The
Commonwealth Games was supposed to be used to test our strength and
know where we currently stand but the absence of top athletes at the
games has not given us a true picture of ourselves,” he said.

In the absence of
the Commonwealth’s best athletes like Usain Bolt and Ashafa Powell,
only a handful of world class performances were on display. The men’s
100m race won by Jamaican, Lerone Clark was particularly a drab event.
This was because all seven Jamaicans who had run faster than Clark this
year, including the world’s fastest man Usain Bolt, did not come to
Delhi.

This is made more
glaring by the fact that Clark’s winning time of 10.12 seconds is the
112th fastest time in the world this year, a time slower than that run
by his countryman Don Quarrie to win gold at the 1978 Commonwealth
Games in Edmonton, Canada.

Like Victoria, like Atlanta

Despite all this,
Nigeria’s Sports Minister, believes the country can begin to hope for a
better outing at the subsequent Games coming up, most importantly the
London 2012 Olympics.

“If we were able to
achieve this level of success I wonder what would have happened if we
had prepared properly. But this does not mean that this is the way it
will continue. We will not rest on our laurels and I intend to see to
it that we build on this success by preparing properly for the London
2012 Olympics,” Bio said last week.

With the
performance in Delhi being Nigeria’s best in sixteen years, there’s a
feeling that perhaps Nigeria may go on to achieve big things at the
London Olympics in two year’s time. The feeling is premised on the fact
that in 1994 when Nigeria had its best outing to date at the games, it
went on two years later to win its first gold medal at Olympics when
Chioma Ajunwa finished in first place in Long Jump at the Atlanta
Olympic Games.

Tainted medals

Despite its good fortune in Delhi, the failed dope test of three of its athletes leaves a question mark on our medals haul.

Stripped of one
gold and two silver medals, Nigeria turned out to be the biggest
culprit on the list of countries whose athletes failed dope tests at
the games.

Coincidentally for
Nigeria, all the cases of drug use were recorded in athletics, a trend,
which Tony Urhobo, former Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN)
President, described as disturbing.

“It’s a huge
disgrace and a dent on our image. Of course it could give room for
question on how clean the other medals are,” he said.

Urhobo disagreed with the argument that some of the athletes may have taken the substance they were found guilty of in error.

“That is not true,
the athletes know what they are taking; they were only hoping that they
would not be caught which eventually they were.”

For Urhobo, sports
officials should be more concerned about warning athletes on the
dangers of using drugs rather than trying to cover up for them when
they get caught. He advised that adequate structures should be in place
for preparation to begin for the next set of games the country will be
competing in.

“The issue of drugs
and sport need to be addressed squarely, our athletes should know that
there are no short cut to success, they need to train hard to attain
the feat they desire. It is unfair where you want to win at all cost
and then take drugs to outwit others, such acts ought to condemned
totally,” he said.

Lalit Bhanot, the
secretary general of the organising committee of the Delhi Games,
called the latest set of incidents “unfortunate” and said though the
federations and the National Anti-Doping Agency had done their best,
testing athletes regularly, it was difficult to control doping if
sports people were dedicated to taking banned substances.

Over the years,
drugs and sports have gone hand-in-hand since competitive events began.
In ancient Greece, Olympic athletes would eat specially prepared meat
(including lizards), and drink magic potions to boost their
performances.

It’s no different
in modern sport, which is rife with suspicions about
performance-enhancing drug use by many top athletes. The usual suspects
are human-growth hormones (which promote physical development),
anabolic steroids (drugs that resemble testosterone and control the
metabolic rate), beta-blockers, erythropoietin, stimulants and
diuretics.

But even more
serious than the implications for fairness is the fact that many of
these drugs have severe side effects, which are not completely
understood even today. They pose genuine health risks, which go
unheeded by athletes intent on winning their events at all costs.

One athlete who
paid with his life was Danish cyclist Enemark Jensen, who lost
consciousness and fell off his bike during the 1960 Olympics in Rome,
causing his death. He was found to be under the influence of
amphetamines.

With three Nigerians currently serving bans for drug use yet to
complete their punishment and another set primed to join them, the
evils in drug use needs to be emphasised.