You want more medals? Glory? Easy, just invest in modern sports facilities

A wonderful video doing the rounds on the Internet shows the first time cocoa bean farmers tasted chocolate, the thing that companies in Europe make out of their raw beans.

“It is so sweet!” “This is wonderful!” “Now you see why white men are so healthy!” they exclaim. (Never mind the fact chocolates are not the healthiest of food choices)

The wide-eyed surprise of the farmers summarises a problem with Africa which is put on display every time a major competition such as the Olympics, World Championships or the Commonwealth Games comes around.

We thrive on raw talent and invest very little in value addition. The farmers in Cote d’Ivoire frankly told their TV interviewer that they don’t know what cocoa beans are for. They just sell them to a broker.

That’s because the West Africans have never thought of using their dominant position as key producers of cocoa beans to insist that production of chocolates should be hosted in that part of the world.

In sports, our collective failure to move a step forward from raw, God-given talent is put on vivid display in events such as the Commonwealth Games.
The medals that Africans claim at these championships almost exclusively come in those disciplines that require nothing beyond pure personal talent.

You can wake up and run up and down the hills every morning, so whether a federation invests in athletics infrastructure or not, it is likely that if you are talented and hard working, you can earn gold and make a name for yourself.

SERIOUS FORCE

When it comes to disciplines such as hockey, badminton, gymnastics, netball, diving and others, the winners come almost exclusively from industrialised societies where they have disciplined sports associations that invest in facilities for their teams and don’t just depend on raw talent.

In a sense, we will know that Africa is maturing and developing into a serious force on the world stage when we see countries such as Kenya, Botswana and Nigeria winning medals in fields outside athletics.

The fiasco surrounding the late payment of allowances, a crisis which Roy Gachuhi explained on these pages has been the routine in every event for the last 30 years, shows where the problem lies. Sports association officials prefer to line their own pockets with the annual funds they receive from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) rather than investing in young sportsmen and women.

The accounts statement for 2005, for example, shows that the National Olympic Committee of Kenya (Nock) paid executives an annual gratuity of Sh2.3 million while giving associations Sh1.3 million.

These problems are covered up by the gallant performance of the athletes on the track, but they must be confronted if Kenya is to take the next step as a sports power-house and win in the many events we can thrive in with a little more investment.

Cycling is one of the fields in which the country would do better if the facilities were available. Tomorrow, three Kenyans, John Njoroge, Suleiman Kangangi and Paul Ajiko, will take on some of the world’s best cyclists in the road race through the streets of Glasgow.

But as we know from the story of Chris Froome, who had to move to South Africa and later England to find the facilities that paved the way to his eventual success, their preparations have been far from ideal.

They trained without a mechanic for their bikes in Kenya and their time-trial bikes arrived in Glasgow only last week.

But theirs is a typical story of determination to race against the odds and they have attracted some media attention with the Guardian running a profile of the racing trio. They honed their skills in everyday pursuits without anticipating they could find their way to a major championship.

Njoroge, a milk man from Naivasha, for example, learnt to cycle as part of his job delivering 60kg of milk every morning over long distances.

“I was working very hard. My body was used to the heavy weight and I liked to ride at high speeds. When I heard about the Kenyan Riders team, I trained as much as I could to ensure that I could join them.

Cycling for Kenya is my dream.” As ever, their talents were shaped by foreigners, including Nick Leong, a former Singaporean photographer who moved to Iten and formed Kenyan Riders, the country’s first professional cycling team, who have 11 riders.

KENYA CULTURE

Their coach, Simon Blake argues the sport could be dominated by Africans in a decade with a bit of investment. “Bicycles are part of the Kenyan culture but so far they are used only as a utility tool,” he says.
“There is no established racing scene in Kenya and racing there is at such a low level compared to where we want to be in the future. We have to go abroad for practice but unfortunately that costs heaps of money.”
The raw talent exists, however, and Blake says there is more to come. “The world has to watch out. In five to 10 years it will be Africans dominating the big Tours.”
That will happen only if officials stop lining their pockets and invest in the talent that abounds on the African continent.

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David Rudisha did not manage to secure the Commonwealth gold he had craved and which the crowd in Glasgow clearly hoped he would, going by the huge roar which greeted his name on Thursday night.

The great man is recovering from an injury and is feeling his way back into full fitness. But it is a source of concern that Nijel Amos of Botswana seems to have found a way to beat him by waiting out his initial burst of pace and sprinting in the last 100 metres.

Considering how tactical the 800m race is, might Rudisha consider widening his coaching team to see how to improve his finish ahead of Rio 2016?

Amos has clearly benefited from his training regime with the famed Jean Verster at the FNB High Performance Institute in South Africa and to consolidate his place in the history books, Rudisha will want to ensure he finds an answer to the challenge from Amos and the Ethiopian who did not run in Glasgow, Mohammed Aman, a 20-year-old with designs on King Rudisha’s crown.