Sports
Eyes on the relays
France staged a historic and perhaps, the most exciting Olympic Games opening ceremony yesterday to kick start the Paris 2024 Games.
For the first time in the history of the Games, Paris staged an impressive opening ceremony outside a stadium.
When it was first announced, a few doubting ‘Thomases’ were alarmed over the arrangement put in place and others over security.
But pessimists were silenced with yesterday’s spectacular event that saw athletes parade in boats along the Seine River.
The ceremony marked a shift from the usual scenes of athletes marching around athletics tracks and dressed resplendently in attires designed in national colours with placards indicating names of their countries.
Yesterday’s invention gave participants and viewers a rare vibrant river parade that travelled through the heart of the French capital.
The river Seine replaced the traditional track with the iconic Paris landmarks creating a beautiful scene for the event.
The athletes were grouped with their national teams on the boats and ultimately arrived opposite to where official protocols were conducted, and the Olympic cauldron lit to open the 2024 Games officially.
In all, nearly 100 boats carried approximately 10,500 athletes.
As the various teams filed past, curiously, one could predict or imagine how the medal table may be like by August 11 when the Games end.
Team America was among the heavily represented sides in this edition with others including Great Britain, Australia, the Netherlands and others also parading very large contingents.
But there was also the group of countries whose numbers could compete for the smallest team prize tag at the Games, if there was one.
Ghana was in this particular group with nine members, yet poised to make an impact.
What that impact might be is what may keep Ghanaians glued to their television sets to watch which discipline and athlete would prove skeptics wrong.
Team Ghana is making appearances in athletics (men’s 100m, 200m, 4x100m), women’s high jump and swimming.
Athletes expected in action for Team Ghana comprises of Benjamin Azamati and Abdul- Rasheed Saminu (men’s 100m and men’s 4x100m), Rose Amoaniwaa Yeboah (women’s high jump), Harry Stacey (men’s 100m freestyle) and Joselle Mensah (women’s 50m freestyle).
Their times and records obviously do not present them as medal prospect, however the men’s 4x100m relay has shown much promise with their performance at the Africa Games where they lost narrowly in the finals of the 4x100m event to Nigeria in a photo finish.
The Nigerians ended on 38.41 seconds with Ghana crossing the tape on 38.43 seconds.
But they headed to Bahamas to book the Paris 2024 ticket with an improved time of 38.29 seconds to win the Olympic Qualifying Round 2 race.
That feat also recorded better individual times from each of the athletes that featured.
The height of Ghanaian optimism was the announcement of an automatic qualification to the semi-finals of the 4×100 metre race at the Games for being part of the 16 countries to have qualified from the World Relay Championship in Bahamas in May this year.
It gives the quartetsome vim ahead of the semifinal showdown, but must be aware of the nature of competition at that level.
With this background, Ghanaians have every reason to be optimistic about the chances of the relay quartet. At the semifinal stage, a little bit of hard work and concentration could ship the team to a dream final against the ‘best of the best’ relay teams, notably USA, Jamaica, Netherlands, Nigeria, Italy and a few that may be out to cause upsets.
It is a decent challenge they must embrace.
That, in no doubt should spur on other members of Team Ghana who are now considered as dark horses to make that expected impact.
By Andrew Nortey
Sports
Heed to Saminu’s appeal
BEYOND Abdul Rasheed Saminu’s sensational triumph in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) East Preliminary Round lies a call every athletics enthusiast must heed to.
Saminu is Ghana’s latest athletics kid on the block after breaking Benjamin Azamati’s national record in 100m set in 2022.
Azamati set the previous record with a time of 9.87seconds (wind assisted) but Saminu showed class when he dropped it to 9.86 seconds to draw comparisons with South Africa’s leading athlete, Akani Simbine, who clocked 9.90 seconds this year.
The feat earned Saminu a place at the World Athletics Championship to be held in the city of Tokyo in Japan in September.
In that moment of joy, he stormed X (formerly Twitter), where he made a passionate appeal to managers of the sport back home in Ghana.
“Hopefully more to come and I want the world to know we got talents in Ghana. It’s an honour to be the new national record holder…local based athletes deserve more attention as well” he wrote on X.
Previously a typical local athlete that hails from the village of Nanumba in Ghana where he switched to athletics after failing to make a mark in football, Saminu has seen it all at that level of sports in Ghana; the reason why his call cannot and must not be ignored.
In Ghana, football at the lower tiers is often described as ‘wilderness’, a situation that suggest the harsh and difficult circumstances under which clubs navigate their way to the top.
The story with athletics is not different, if not more difficult than football which offers so many platform for players in every corner of the country to showcase their skills.
The now University of South Florida (USF) athlete understands the challenges his peers face in Ghana, trying to rise to the very top level.
The biggest obstacle for athletics in Ghana is the unavailability of infrastructure. Currently, the Legon Sports Stadium remains the only recognised athletics facility in the whole country, courtesy of Ghana’s hosting of the Africa Games Accra 2023 event.
Other facilities around the country are in terrible shapes, and readily coming to mind is the Elwak Sports Stadium which became an alternative venue after the running tracks at the Accra Sports Stadium was scrapped to enable Ghana increase the capacity of the structure to host AFCON 2008.
From 2008 to 2023 when the Africa Games was hosted, nothing was done to develop and promote athletics in Ghana.
Apart from infrastructure, lack of regular competitions have been the biggest bane of the sport as young and promising athletes turn their running spikes into boots to play community football after their second cycle education.
One may ask why but the reason is simple. After completing Senior High School, the next hope for competition lies in their ability to make it to a tertiary institution where they either participate in University games or what was known as Polytechnic (now technical universities) games.
For those that fail to progress, it means the end of a burgeoning career in sports, notably athletics.
That, however, appear to have been dealt with in a way as universities now consider brilliant sports athletes for admission but that’s quite limited.
Unlike football which has clubs scattered all around, athletics have few clubs to accommodate the unlucky ones.
Now in the case where few competitions were organised, prizes presented at some of these competitions were nothing to write home about.
I have witnessed the organisation of such events in the past where winners of some disciplines received pressing irons, fans, heaters, cameras and other products.
From such products, one wonders how such athletes without proper management teams are able to survive and also prepare for other events.
For an athlete with such humble beginnings to his current status to make such call, it truly mean there are a lot of things fundamentally wrong with the athletics system in Ghana.
The current managers of the sport led by the dynamic Bawa Fuseini appear to be doing very well to improve their fortunes but while focusing on getting athletes to qualify for the big events, they must find ways to address concerns such as the one coming from Saminu.
By Andrew Nortey
Sports
Kotoko, Goldstars, Nations FC in contention for league honours tomorrow
The curtain will officially be lowered on the 2024-25 Ghana Premier League (GPL) season tomorrow with all final round fixtures set to kick off simultaneously at 3pm.
With the title race, top-four finish, and final standings on the line, fans can expect a dramatic and action-packed conclusion to what has been a compelling campaign.
In Accra, Hearts of Oak will be aiming to secure a top-four finish as they welcome FC Samartex 1996 to the Accra Sports Stadium. The Phobians, buoyed by recent form, are eager to end the season on a high in front of their home fans.
Accra Lions face a daunting away trip to Bibiani, where they will take on title-chasing, Gold Stars FC, in a crucial fixture with Premier League implications. Gold Stars, locked in a tight title race, know that only a win will keep their hopes alive.
Dreams FC, safe in mid-table, will host relegated Legon Cities in what is expected to be a low-stakes encounter.
In another intriguing matchup, Bechem United square off with Young Apostles at the Nana Gyeabour Park, while Aduana FC will look to finish strong as they host Basake Holy Stars at the Nana Agyemang Badu I Park.
The spotlight, however, will be firmly on Nations FC, who remain firmly in the title picture. They host Heart of Lions in a must-win fixture that could decide the destiny of the league crown.
Elsewhere, Medeama SC welcome Berekum Chelsea to the TnA Stadium in Tarkwa.
Vision FC, who have impressively retained their top-flight status in their debut season, will host Asante Kotoko at the Nii Adjei Kraku II Sports Complex. –Ghanafa.org
