At Olympics, you don’t have to participate to be a winner

Mary Onyali (right) and other athletes celebrate the historic Bronze medal at Barcelona ’92 Olympics<br />Games in Spain<br />

It was in 1992, at the finals of the 4×100 metres relay race of the Barcelona Olympic Games in Spain.

The Nigerian female quartet ran the last 50 metres of the race at such a blistering pace that no one in the 54,000 capacity Montjuic Stadium knew for sure which country came third, including the girls themselves. It was that close, between Nigeria and France.

In the end, slow-motion, photo-finish replays confirmed that the Nigerian girls breasted the finish line just ahead of their French rivals with less than a hair’s breadth separating them. Although Nigeria came third and won the Bronze medal, the filled terraces rose in unison to applaud the Nigerian girls as they ‘flew’ around the track in exuberant and ecstatic celebration. The manner of their abundant celebration defined the true spirit of ‘winning’.

In 2005, CNN chose the pictures of the celebrating girls and the spontaneous reaction of the cheering crowd to capture the essence of sport and Olympism with the eternal caption, “At the Olympic Games, you do not have to come first to be a winner”.

Those pictures and caption re-defined what it means to ‘Win’. They were used in the media blitz during the celebrations of the Centennial Games in 2006 in Athens, Greece, the original home of the Olympics.

In a totally unrelated event, earlier in 1980, the American government withdrew their athletes from the Olympic Games in Moscow, USSR, in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR.

It was the second incursion of politics and international diplomacy in sport at that level. The tradition of deploying boycotts at the World’s biggest, most