To perhaps increase their chances at winning medals, the whole United Kingdom fragments into England, Scotland, Nothern Ireland and Wales. This is very clever. Fairness does seem an intrusion here. Their opponents don’t seem to have realised this. If they have, they don’t seem to have those spherical steel things to speak out.
Testicular fortitude is just not the forte of those that have been colonised before. We do have some history in these types of games. Who can forget the day one xenophobia-infested European called our country a country inhabited by mainly goats and that meeting a person is incidental. This sufficiently cranked up one of our elite boxers’ fury to the point where he broke his next opponent’s nose.
This was somewhere around 2008 when it was lawful for boxers to bring a national infraction into a boxing ring and make an innocent boxer pay through his nose.
It seems our man had taken the expression paying through the nose literally but we didn’t care actually. With the vanquished Moroccan boxer crying something like ‘Thay thid anyone get ze number of zat truck’ our man proceeded to the subsequent round.
But he did not get a medal. In any case, it was round about the time getting medals was not expected. International competitions were about international travel for two or three athletes with close to seven or so officials. The officials ranged from coach, dietician, physical trainer, psychologist, chef de mission, masseur and other per diem-hunting officers.
This is the standard Commonwealth Games travel kit for many nations with very little chances of medaling.
The adage the more the merrier has never been so apt. We progressively got better as the years went by and we re-jigged our teams such that we had more athletes than officials and that is when medals started to happen.
This was figured out using very powerful computers and is now a standard template for many of our type during Commonwealth Games. We were busy enjoying the Commonwealth Games when the strangest happened.
Ok, I recognise that from our neck of the woods in Africa, one could hardly say we were enjoying the games. What with the implosion of our teams and our athletes falling like dominoes this was hardly the kind of games to enthuse about. It all started with the man they call Badman announcing his retirement. There is absolutely nothing wrong with retirement but it came out this announcement was made somewhere in Birmingham. Isaac Makwala seems to have somehow gotten into the wrong bus.
He insisted though that he was on the right bus. With the powers-that-be smothered with egg all over their faces like a baking effort from someone who owns a chicken farm, the stalemate sustained right to the end of the games. How he got into the bus going to Birmingham and the both the conductor and driver failed to realise this until the bus reached the destination remains a mystery.
Long story short, Badman was informed in no uncertain terms that he had no business being there in the first place. He was then advised to leave and get on the bus to Botswana as he was not going to race.
Badman living up to his name, he flatly refused.
One would have expected an amicable separation between the two – not amicable as defined by sports people though. Let me define an amicable separation in sport. It is when whoever gets to put together a press conference says, ‘we have amicably parted ways with So and So’ meaning that we actually forced him to agree to our terms of separation. So we actually now await a plane from Birmingham full of people with long and sour faces like they have swallowed a truckful of bitter lemons.
(For comments, feedback and insults email [email protected]) Thulaganyo Jankey is a training consultant who runs his own training consultancy that provides training in BQA- accredited courses. His other services include registering consultancies with BQA and developing training courses. Contact him on 74447920 or email [email protected].
