The Black Bombers team on arrival in Bankok

In a little over two months, the biggest global sports fiesta, the Olympic Games will kick-off in France.

Christened the 2024 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad and commonly known as Paris 2024, the upcoming international multi-sport event is scheduled to take place from July 26 to August 11 with the motto: Ouvrons grand les Jeux.

That translated to English means‘Games wide open’.

It will indeed be widely open as approximately 10, 500 athletes converge on the city of Paris to compete in 329 events in 32 sports disciplines.

That number of contingents would definitely include that of Ghana which is expected to be comprised of athletes, boxers, cyclists, badminton, table tennis, hockey, volleyball players and many others from the over 50 sports disciplines in the country.

However, the nature of qualification to the Games has more or less become a hindrance for athletes of these disciplines.

For some of them, it has become an activity similar to qualification to the quadrennial FIFA World Cup.

Currently, the only team or group of athletes that have qualified to represent Ghana at the global sports extravaganza is the 4x100m Relay Team that secured qualification from the recently held athletics championships in the Bahamas.

Apart from the relay team, Ghana’s participation in the championship hang in the balance as athletes struggle to record qualification marks and times in their respective trials.

Hence, the national boxing team, Black Bombers’ participationin the Paris 2024 Olympics qualifiers in Bankok, Thailand from today offers a glimmer of hope.

As the most successful Ghanaian team in the history of the Olympics, it is not out of place to trust in their ability to add to Ghana’s numbers in the Games to improve the country’s standing on the all-time medal table of the Games.

Out of Ghana’s 16 appearances, she could only boast of five medals – four bronze and a silver, with four coming from the Black Bombers and one bronze from the Black Meteors team of the 1992 edition held in Barcelona.

That impressive record as Ghana’s best Olympics team is what must spur on flyweight Theophilus Kpakpo Allotey, featherweightMohammed Amadu, light welterweight Joseph Commey, light middleweight Henry Malm, light heavyweight Jonathan Tetteh, British-based super heavyweightMark Kodjovi Ahondjo and United States-based female middleweight Ornella Sathoud to snatch some of the 51 places allotted from the trials.

The situation again raises eyebrows over the state of Ghana sports and it free fall with very little or no effort to rescue it.

Like it’s always said, the time for officialdom to act to save Ghana sports is now. If Ghana is not able to qualify in football which is her biggest sports pride, struggling to qualify athletes and boxers, then it meant the door would be completely shut on those with smaller budgets.

While we wait to see attempts to improve Ghana’s 125th ranking on the Olympics medal table, we wish the Black Bombers well in this endeavour to restore the nation’s sporting pride.

By Andrew Nortey