The sports diplomat

Super Africa Rugby team on their way to the final of the 2023 Rugby World Cup

This weekend, the All Blacks of New Zealand and the Springsboks of South Africa will meet to settle their scores at the final match of the 2023 Rugby World Cup in Paris, France. The match is significant in too many ways to the world, particularly, the place of Sports diplomacy in an emerging new World Order in the aftermath of the ongoing crisis and wars amongst the superpowers around the world.

Even from my limited personal understanding of sports diplomacy and its role in the past, I can see clearly now why it is important to see this weekend’s match from the perspective of history. Until 1976 the only thing I sensed (not knew) about sports diplomacy happened in the early 1970s. When the icy relationship between China and the USA was to thaw, a friendly Table Tennis match between them was arranged to lubricate the process. It was so successful that ‘Ping Pong diplomacy’ found a place in international diplomatic lexicon.

In 1976, I was a young graduate of Mechanical Engineering, freshly minted from the world-class engineering workshops of The Polytechnic Ibadan of the 1970s. I was waiting for my posting to either Lagos State or Oyo State for the one-year compulsory National Youth Service Corp scheme when I was drafted, at the very ‘last-minute’, to join the Green Eagles, the national football team of Nigeria, on their tour of Europe for their final preparation for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, Canada.

Olympic Games? It was a dream, too good to be true. Never in my wildest dreams had I ever imagined me at an Olympic Games as an athlete. Such feats were meant for gods only. Yet, there I was heading to Europe for the first time in my life,