Of all the athletes I’ve ever talked to, the one who most impressed me as a Canadian was Daniel Igali, the wrestler who won a gold medal at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. That Igali was born in Nigeria and even represented that country at the Commonwealth Games in Victoria in 1994 mattered not. I felt less Canadian by comparison. I’m like most people who’ll pick up this magazine—I acquired my Canadian citizenship by birthright—but for Igali it was a matter of choice and sacrifice. He sought refugee status in ’94 and gained citizenship four years later. He absorbed the considerable cost of separation from family with no promise of rewards or outside support. At some point before he took his oath and gained his citizenship, Igali had fallen in love with the country, appreciated the people and institutions helping him along the way and set down roots. “I am a Canadian,” he told me. “There will always be a part of me that is in Nigeria. But that doesn’t mean I’m not truly Canadian.”
You’d have to have a hard heart not to have been pulling for him in Australia. And when he won, it was one of the most memorable moments in Canada’s recent Olympic history. And it felt like an honest and completely Canadian moment when he stood on the podium and listened to “O Canada.” Others will be in that position in London, and a few of them won’t engender the same sort of feelings.
Even for the home fans, feelings will be mixed if Tiffany Porter is standing on the podium and the Union Jack is being raised while “God Save the Queen” plays. After all, Porter, a hurdler, was born in Michigan. Moreover, when she was serving as captain of the British team at the European indoor track championships earlier this year, she admitted that she didn’t know the words to the British national anthem.
it’s easy to tell when an issue of integrity for the International Olympic Committee is about to reach the point of crisis—IOC members reflexively deny the existence of the issue. With a crisis, though, it’s different. They have to acknowledge it while lamenting their powerlessness to act on it.
And so it is with citizenship and nationality of convenience, a growing phenomenon in Olympic competition. In fact, the Olympic movement is rife with the movement of athletes from their nations of origin to others where their circumstances seem more promising. And in this case, more promising carries more than the faint whiff of money. Like their brothers in pro sports, many Olympic athletes like to think of themselves as free agents available for the bidding and believe it’s only fair that they can choose the team (or in this case the nation) they’ll go higher/faster/stronger for.
In the run-up to London’s Games, IOC president Jacques Rogge could no longer stonewall when asked about Olympians shopping for countries. In March, Rogge took a shot at athletes who abandon one nation for another for financial reasons: “Let me tell you, very frankly, I don’t love that.” But anyone hoping Rogge would push hard for the committee’s intervention was let down: “We cannot legally stop that because it is a sovereign matter.”
And so what is supposed to be the most moving of the ceremonies in London will be in fact its most comical and fraudulent: the parade of the athletes into Olympic Stadium behind the flags of their respective nations. In Tiffany Porter’s case, and in many others, those would be the flags of the nations of their choosing. And if that leaves you feeling cynical about the event rather than warm and fuzzy, it’s a crisis for the IOC and the Olympic brand.
Look, I can take a pass on the opening ceremonies of any Olympic Games. That makes me no different than those athletes who sit it out because their chief concern is an imminent competition rather than a place in the pageant. I don’t feel the need to watch a slow march of those who have trained for years for honest athletic toil. And it’s the most overtly political of moments in what is supposed to be an event above politics. Every opportunist down the food chain tries to horn in. From Hitler to Brezhnev to Reagan to Bush 43 to the entire Chinese Politburo, everyone has seized the opening ceremonies as a source of political capital at some point. It’s enough for me to watch athletes compete for themselves rather than serve as tools for propaganda.
If it weren’t for the opening ceremonies and the parade, would nations matter? You can mount an aesthetic case that, if the intention were to bring the world together, the opening ceremonies should look like the closing show, when all the flag bearers enter the stadium, and in their wake come the athletes unsorted by nationality, a blending into one big pool of humanity. And you can mount an even more compelling case that the Olympics would be better if it were sans frontieres in their entirety. Have it like the closing ceremonies and stow the flags in the warehouse. Let it be about athletes and not nations. After all, Olympic founder Baron de Coubertin said he created the Games “for the glorification of the individual champion.” He said nothing about patriotism or countries basking in the reflected glow of their champions.
The world hasn’t quite homogenized, even if you’ll come across McDonald’s in Moscow and Beijing and find products from other official Olympic sponsors there and everywhere else. Globalism hasn’t quite imposed a single world order, even if it seems to be trending that way. But if anyone is out ahead on the idea of disregarding borders, it is the athletes themselves. You don’t have to be a cynic to think that nationality and citizenship are entirely fluid things. In fact they might not be so substantial as to be fluid—maybe something closer to vaporous or ethereal.
I’m not counting athletes who were born in one country and emigrated to another with their parents at a young age. Athletes in those circumstances are above reproach. For instance, no one questions the nationality of Donovan Bailey. Maybe Jamaica, the country of Bailey’s origin, might want to make some sort of claim on him, and he clearly has an attachment to it, and so be it. Likewise, few are even aware that
Daniel Nestor was born in Belgrade and
no one thinks of him as Serbian rather
than Canadian.
And I’m inclined to give a complete pass to those athletes who change allegiances out of desperation and oppression. Naim Süleymanoglu—arguably the greatest weightlifter in history,—was born in Bulgaria in the Communist era and, like others in the Turkish minority, was forced to change his name and largely renounce his ethnicity. Süleymanoglu was the two-time defending world champion competing for Bulgaria when he defected at an event in Australia and applied for Turkish citizenship. Competing for Turkey, he won three Olympic competitions and five world championships. His is a different case than Bailey’s or Nestor’s, but, again, unimpeachable.
And I don’t care what professional athletes do independent of the Olympics. Let Lennox Lewis be the case in point. He was born in London, England, and moved to Kitchener, Ont., where he learned to box. He competed for Canada as an amateur and won an Olympic gold in Los Angeles in ’84. When it came time to turn professional, he repatriated himself. He represented himself as a Briton and affected an accent that sounded as genuinely English as Dick Van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins. It was a pure business decision. It came in the theatre of professional boxing where there’s a long tradition of fighters dubiously claiming nationalities for the sake of branding and marketability.
But it’ll be beyond the pale when you see Bernard Lagat competing for the United States on the track in London. It might be unfair to single out Lagat, but he is at once an instructive and a high-profile example of what has effectively become international sport’s free agency.
Lagat won the bronze in the 1,500 metres in Sydney in 2000 and silver four years later in Athens. All well and good. He did so, however, wearing the colours of Kenya, the country where he was born, raised and developed as an international runner. After Athens, Lagat switched allegiances, and in short order he became the national record holder in the metric mile in both the U.S. and Kenya. Further muddying the waters, Lagat already held a U.S. passport in 2004 unbeknownst to Kenyan officials, and in the wake of his last race as a Kenyan his eligibility to represent the country was a matter of some dispute, at least as far as Kenyan officials were concerned .
Lagat shouldn’t be considered a trailblazer. While Lagat was rising through the ranks, Wilson Kipketer was the world’s top-ranked 800-metre runner. Kipketer never ran a major race as a Kenyan, however. He enrolled as a college student in Denmark and applied for citizenship there. He won the worlds for Denmark in 1995 after international track authorities ruled that his five years of residency made him a legitimate Dane. A year later, however, the IOC declared him ineligible for Athens because he was one year short of acquiring his Danish citizenship. In fact, it might have been Kipketer’s lost Olympic opportunity that motivated Lagat to time his switch of allegiances as he did and to be less than open and forthcoming about it.
And though the U.S. has the psychic draw and commercial potential to attract athletes like Lagat, some who are born there opt to compete for other nations. It might seem fair for Latino boxers in the U.S. to represent Mexico, and, in fact, five of its nine-man Olympic squad four years ago were American-born.
If Lagat is the poster boy for nation-hopping athletes, then Porter is the distaff equivalent. Porter, the daughter of a Nigerian father and a British-born mother, was born in Ypsilanti, Mich., and first competed as Tiffany Ofili (taking her father’s name) for the U.S., but switched over to Great Britain as Tiffany Porter in open competition. When she broke the British hurdles record, the former record holder, Angie Thorp, said she was “devastated” that an American-born athlete now owned her mark, but would have congratulated any unambiguous Briton who accomplished the feat.
According to the Daily Telegraph, 542 athletes are slated to compete for Great Britain in London, and 60 of them were born abroad. Eight of them have competed at elite international level for other countries, and triple jumper Yamilé Aldama is on her third nation, having competed previously for Cuba and Sudan. Porter, Aldama and the rest have been tagged “the plastic Brits” because of their shifting allegiances.
In Canada, we’ve seen our Olympic track heroes opt for free agency: Mark McKoy won the 110-metre hurdles wearing Canadian colours in Barcelona in 1992, but he had moved to Austria and was in the process of acquiring citizenship there. He spent the last years of his career competing for Austria. It might be taken as a not so subtle dig at Canadian officials, who had handed him a two-year ban in the wake of the Dubin Inquiry into steroid use.
A few athletes have been badly burned when they thought they had successfully gamed the system. Another Kenyan international runner, Leonard Mucheru, took his talents to the market and, with the promise of lavish accommodation and a salary for life, defected to the highest bidder, Bahrain. Mucheru adopted the name of Mushir Salem Jawher, and his eligibility was expedited. But then his eligibility and Bahraini passport were revoked after he won a marathon in Israel, a nation which many Arab nations don’t recognize. The Bahraini athletes’ union didn’t go to bat for him, but rather struck his name from its register.
if jacques rogge and the IOC wanted to step in, you suppose they could. They did, after all, shunt Wilson Kipketer to the sidelines, and his claim to Danish citizenship was far from the most dubious. But there is a risk to wielding the hammer and mistaking honest athletes for nails.
There will be Plastic Brits and Fast-Track Americans and many others, and despite having the papers in order, they’ll all seem less legitimate than Igali. It is in fact nothing that can be documented, but rather something that must be intuited. You know it when you see it, says Kevin Wamsley, a professor with the University of Western Ontario’s Centre for Olympic Studies. Officials want to see an athlete’s attachment to their adopted country. “They want to see some sort of buy-in,” Wamsley says.
If Daniel Igali had somehow been shut out of the Olympics because of an IOC dragnet to take down athletes with questionable passports and national allegiances, it would have been a rank injustice. And it would have been a crisis far worse than the one Rogge and the IOC has acknowledged and lamented, but not yet acted upon.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.