By Segun Odegbami
I should be in Tokyo, Japan, by now, but I am not.
For the first time since Atlanta ’96 I looked forward to going to the Olympics again….
Unfortunately, my clout in sports amounted to nothing when it came to the issue of visa clearance to attend the games. So…. I have had to shelve the idea of physically attending an Olympic Games that had created historical antecedents, even before it began.
Now that I not in Tokyo, my imagination and creativity are being tested and I have to come up with new out-of-the-box possibilities, using new technological tools available today that were not even in the realm of imagination some 41 years ago when I went to my second Olympics and we were faced with a slightly similar situation in the need to document history.
What follows the above is that.. with only the telephone in his room….Owolabi Ilori created mouthwatering scenarios of things going on in the Olympic Village, straight out of ‘The School of Scandal’.
Until he died, Isaac Akioye, the greatest sports administrator in Nigeria’s sports history, never forgave the country for the treatment meted out to him after Moscow ’80. He retired from society, started to live a reclusive life, and died with bitterness in his heart. It all started from Owolabi Ilori’s ‘The Telephone’ series, reports from his hotel room at the Moscow Olympics in 1980.
What all this means is that,no matter how restrictive the Olympics may be, a creative mind would always find a way to bring reports that would interest the people……That is the setting we now find in Tokyo 2020.
I cannot be there physically. Yet, I have to be there……That is what this is all about.
I am deploying an ‘Eye’ perched on an Eagle that will hover over the Olympic Village in Tokyo as well as over the athletes from Nigeria, to bring you……the fascinating stories of the life of athletes at the Olympics.
Get into the mood and groove of what is to come in the next 14 days by getting a copy of Saturday edition of any one of Complete Sports, Vanguard and the Guardian newspapers, and read the introduction to this fascinating but challenging journalistic journey.
Or visit my website, www:mathematical7.com from noon tomorrow and read a fascinating excursion into the past, present and future of the Olympic Games through ‘Eye on Tokyo 2020’.
