The Games has ended peacefully but Tanzania continues to lose hope as medal-winning becomes a nightmare despite persistent participation every after four years. It looks we have completely run short of ideas on how best to prepare formidable team that can at least come close to win medals from these global Games.
Neither the Sports authorities nor the athletes themselves have the slightest idea of how best to overcome the medal-drought hoodoo that has been hitting the country since the Moscow Olympics in 1980. Up to the next Olympic Games to be staged in Japan in 2020, we have ample time to build up a team enough to end this 40-year old medal draught syndrome.
Flying back home with empty hands is not the kind of tradition we should cherish.
We have the capacity, will and reason to stage a real fight in erasing the poor history that keeps on recurring after every Olympic Games.
A notion from the Tanzania Olympic Committee’s secretary general Filbert Bayi that Olympics does not mean to win medals, is an attitude needs to be buried immediately as it imparts a poor vision to our athletes.
We must at all cost stay focused on winning an Olympic medal as a top priority agenda than anything else after every four years of the global show.
A forty-year stint is by any standard too long of a time to bear missing the medals while frequently fielding teams for the competition.
The Olympics and Commonwealth Games have now been turned out to be the stage for our athletes to facilitate tourism revenues for the hosting nations.
Very incredible and as such it looks awkward for a nation like Tanzania which is gifted with massive talent to become pushovers in the Olympics, while our neighbours Kenya continues to sparkle. We are certainly not able to match with Kenyan athletes when it comes to Olympics, but can’t we take just a leaf from these people?
If we cannot win medals through track and field events, is it true that we don’t have swimmers despite abundant lakes and rivers flowing all over the country? What about the tough and formidable Ukerewe Kara swimmers who chase and catch fish in Lake Victoria? Can’t these young men be trained to swim and excel in the easiest of freshwater pools?
What about the Maasai and Barbaig men who throws arrows to target animals and kill them; are they not able to compete in the Olympics after extended training?
We have failed to win medals in chasing the air why don’t we try the weightlifting with all those powerful men who carries ‘Lumbesa’ on daily-basis?
We have all the possibilities of winning medals at the Olympics but what we luck is focusing and planning ahead. The boxers, ping-pong, swimmers are always complaining of poor preparations as a result of inadequate funding, how much do we need to train a weightlifter or disc thrower?
We most come out of this nausea of failing to win medals from the Olympics, let’s work hard and stay focused.
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