The Gold Coast, first participated in the Olympics Games in 1952 which was held in Helsinki, Finland, with seven athletes. The glorious moments for nations are when their sportsmen and women receive gold, silver or bronze. We went to Helsinki and saw gold but could not take what rightfully belongs to it.
Seventy-two years on with sixteen participations in the Olympics Games, Ghana can only boast of five medals – one silver and three bronze in boxing and one bronze in soccer.
Gold seems to be eluding us because sometimes, we blow the chances when the opportunities come. In 1980, we followed the West in boycotting the Moscow Olympics Games for political reasons which never concerned us in any way.
Great Britain, one of the loudest nations who called for the boycott, found a cunning way to participate, by asking the sports men and women to choose whether to go to Moscow or not. 214 showed up to compete in 14 games. Britain went on to label the games, Moscow and Coe, in honour of its middle-distance runner, Sebastian Coe, who was later knighted, Sir.
Twenty-one African countries, including Nigeria took part in the 1980 Olympics and four, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe won medals.
During the preparation towards the 1980 Games, Great Britain had in a sprinter, Allan Wells and Ghana had Ernest Obeng who was resident in the UK. Anytime the two met in 100 m, Ernest with 10.21 secs always beat Allan squarely. Allan went to Moscow and won gold with the time of 10.25 secs. Ernest had to watch as what rightfully belonged to him was given to someone else.
Azumah Nelson, won gold medals in the 1978 All-African Games and Commonwealth Games. He was poised to win gold in the Moscow Olympics but Ghana boycotted the games. Ghana could have won at least two gold medals if we had gone to Moscow.
During the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Ghana’s officials, unjustifiably, dropped out Ernest Obeng from the list of 100 m runners, accusing him of things that made no sense.
Then in 2014, Ghana’s Martha Bissah, aged 17, won the gold medal in 800 m girls, at the Youth Olympics in Nanjing, China with a time of 2:04.90. Instead of this becoming a blessing to Ghana, a dispute arose between the young athlete and the Ghana Athletics Association (GAA) resulting in an indefinite ban slammed on her.
The athlete had publicly accused the GAA of attempting to extort money from her and the Association, asked her to name the one who approached her, or retract and apologise. Failure to do so would attract a ban. She failed to provide the evidence and did not retract and apologise so, in June 2016, she was banned.
In 2021, she finally came to retract and apologise. So, why the allegation in the first place? Could it be that, someone closed to Martha told her this extortion story but failed to provide names, and Martha went public with no evidence?
In Ghana, sports officials extorting money meant for sports man and women, is no news. Prof. Dodoo of GAA can bear testimony, of what happened between the Ghana Academicals and officials during the 1977 Ghana-Togo Academicals Games in Lome.
The Martha Bissah issue, might have greatly prevented Ghana from winning a medal in that event in the senior Olympics of 2016 (Rio); 2020 (Tokyo) and 2024 (Paris).
In the 2016 Rio Olympics, the gold medallist, Mokgadi Caster Semenya of South Africa, then 24, recorded a time of 1:55.28, that is almost ten seconds off, Martha’s time of 2:04.90. In athletics, ten seconds can be eternity, a distance of 100 m, but with hard work backed by national spirit Martha could reduce her time to under 2 minutes to win a medal at the Rio Games, if she had competed. But we can never tell because all of Ghana sat down and allowed the impasse between the athlete and the Association, to prevent Ghana from striking gold in Rio.
These days, the sports fever has been extinguished in this country. The Golden era where Ghana was a powerful sporting nation in Africa and the Commonwealth is gone. The inter-schools and colleges games from zonal, regional and national (the breeding grounds for stars) and the National Sports Festival which produced world beaters, like Azumah Nelson and George Osei are now non-existent.
In comes Rex Brobbey, a national sprints star. He started organising sprinting competitions to unearth, Ghana’s fastest. But for some reasons, it seems the GAA was not too pleased with an individual doing what it should be doing. I cannot explain why the Association did not give Rex the full support to unearth world beaters for us.
So, the beat goes on and while more serious nations, will start preparing for the next Olympic Games, immediately after the end of the present one, Ghana will start showing some seriousness only a few months to the start of the games.
We continue going out there and fail to identify what gold looks like, to even bring some home. And yet we are proudly, the leading gold producer in Africa.
During such international games, we take delight in listing Ghanaians who compete in other nations’ colours. Stay tune, for the Ernest Obeng story and why this is so.
By Hon. Daniel Dugan
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s stance.
