We thought we should talk about the Olympics as the very first topic for discussion on this blog. Thinking about it, there are so many ways you could look at this- you can look at it from the global perspective or from the local angle. This particular edition is very interesting because of the host country, China. We have already started seeing a lot of activities targeted against the host. The main thrust of the anti-China activities is to raise awareness about their human rights record. The first line of attack was the Olympic torch tour. We do not remember a shorter Olympic torch tour in history. The route was well planned to create maximum impact and minimum confrontation with protesters. However, the protesters had their own plans as well.

However, the result is that for the first time in recent years, the pre-Olympic leverage activity level is at the lowest. The major Olympic sponsors are not leveraging as heavily as they used to.  For Nigerian companies, the situation is slightly more complicated.
In the last four to eight years, the interest around the Olympic Games in Nigeria has really dwindled.  There are different reasons for this. The first reason is that in some of the cases, the broadcast timing has been unfriendly because of the different time zones. The second and more important reason is that Nigerians are not passionate about the games because they do not see their athletes doing well in the games. Apart from football, Nigerians know that the state of our sports is not such that we expect a lot of medals. This reason is probably more important because if our representatives had good medal hopes, even if their contests came on TV at 2.00am, Nigerians will watch!!! However, our biggest medal hope is in football and we all know how difficult it is to win a medal in football. Even after all the pain, it is only one medal. Of course, the Olympics is a multi-event competition and since Nigeria started participating in Helsinki in 1952, we have only won nineteen  medals with two of them being gold!!! Compare that to Kenya that has been participating since 1956 and has skipped two Olympic games and they have hauled 61 medals in total with 17 being gold!

Some people say the problem is the administration, others say the problem is that corporates are not investing money in any other sport apart from football. We read that the President has set an 8 gold medal target. We know that it is very unlikely that the Nigerian Olympic team will come home with 8 medals but then what is the problem?

Our opinion is that we need to go back to the building blocks. We need to build a programme based on a clear-cut long-term strategy. A strategy that builds on our strengths, engages the athletes from the grassroots and rewards corporates for every kobo spent in sports. A transparent and well-resourced strategy.A strategy that provides different incentives for the key stakeholders. If we do not put such a structure in place, we will continue to go to the Olympics as mere tourists.