INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

ancient city of Olympia around the 776 B.C. Pierre de Coubertin
revived the modern Olympic Games in 1896 through the activities of
the Paris conference. The saying that the important thing in the
Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part seems to have been
overtaken by event. A look at the world today will convince the
average citizen of any country that the time is gone when a country
engages in sport merely for the sake of participation. The expectations
of the populace especially the tax payer whose money is used to run
sport is on winning, sometimes at all cost. Morakinyo (2000) opined
that sport is a social phenomenon that has grown from its humble
beginning of being an entertainment and recreation pastime to become
a visible and prominent business phenomenon that could no longer be
ignored in the social, political, and economic environment of any
nation. Sport has continually occupied the prime time and space in
the electronics and print media, and also occupies the sub-conscious
and conscious of man, to such an extent that man has become
fanatically committed to the cause of sports, either as athletes or
spectators.
Nationalism is propagated through Olympic Games, and success
brings a certain amount of respectability, prestige, status, national
pride which makes the performance of the actors in sport crucial to the
development of sports. Testimony of this is the fact that a country
whose sports men and women perform reasonably well at the
Olympics is granted a huge media coverage. Athletes bring a lot of
honour to their fatherland, an opportunity that other vocations do not
offer. The 1996 Atlanta Olympics achievement enabled Nigeria’s
name to be written in gold, and for the first time, Nigeria’s national
anthem was sung at the Olympics which no doubt placed Nigeria in
the eyes of the international world as an emerging sport giant.
BRIEF HISTORY OF NIGERIA’S PARTICIPATION AT THE
OLYMPICS
Sport is seen in Nigeria like any other country, as a serious
business into which a lot of the nation’s resources go in preparing
athletes and sponsoring them for competitions. In Nigeria where
government still plays a dominant role in the funding of sports, the
- 536 -