Behind the moment of winning

Announcing her retirement after returning home empty-handed from Tokyo 2020, wrestler Samar Hamza hit the nail on the head. The announcement she made on her Facebook account is indeed a personal decision, but while relating the story of years of toil and training she indirectly underlined points of weakness in the local athletic environment at large.

The point is that the results achieved by Egypt’s 137-member team, the country’s largest ever in the Olympics, have not stood up to the expectations of the public.  So far, three players have come back home with a bronze medal each; some have made a marked improvement on their performance and most of the delegation hardly made any progress.

It is actually unfair to judge these players from the podium perspective. They might not have won medals, but on the other hand they must have been involved in a long process of hard training. The question to be asked then is: How far have their training programmes met standards required for the making of Olympic champions?

Hamza said she was proud of female Egyptian wrestlers and of what they had achieved despite the limited available training facilities.

She explained that the regional and African tournaments she won since taking up wrestling in 2013 were basically the product of her personal effort in co-operation with the coach.

Such a claim should actually question the role of sports federations in supporting professional players morally and financially, civil society sponsorship and the availability and/or competence of tailored training programmes for players potentially competing in international events.

Hamza’s message should not prompt a kind of self-flagellation but should rather help bodies concerned redress shortcomings in the whole system. Pros usually have the will to do whatever it takes to reach international standards, but they need much more to achieve their goals. They have to be completely dedicated to the training process in the presence of a several-member team in charge of their athletic career.

The fact is that schools and the educational system are not sports-friendly in the sense that physical education (PE) classes, especially in government schools, have ceased to be part of the school day. Moreover, pupils are overburdened with homework and stuffed syllabi that they have little time for after school activities. The making of professional athletes is a process, which should actually engage several parties, starting from schools. More importantly, it is a long-term process that should come under a clear, multi-faceted state plan in an environment that encourages and facilitates the practice of sports.

We do have world acclaimed players in several games, particularly in squash (which is not among the Olympic Games). The hope is that Egyptian players of other games would find their way to podiums of international events because behind the moment of claiming victory is many years of hard and organised work.