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Gambia’s flagbearer Gina Bass at opening ceremony of Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. PC: GNOC fb page
The Olympic Games officially begin in Tokyo, Japan on Friday July 23, 2021 and Athletics is one of the major competing events for the Gambia team. Flagbearer Gina Bass is shouldering the hope of not just the tiny West African Country but of an entire continent in the 100 and 200m distance races. She has grown in experience and stature in the last couple of years winning top prizes in the African Games and other championships around the world, becoming a dark horse in genuine medal contention . Less of a podium finish hopeful are men’s sprinter Ebrima Camara and Europe-based Judoka Faye Njie and swimmer Ebrima Sorreh Buaro making up the rest of Team Gambia in Tokyo.
Buaro (20), will be competing as an Olympic rookie in the pool with his sport being one of the sporting disciplines with universality places which allow for smaller nations and those with developing swimming programmes to send athletes to the Olympics.
Every Olympic Games is historic, for one reason or another. Many of those are negative. Berlin 1936 (Nazis), Munich 1972 (terrorists), Montreal (costings), Moscow 1980 (boycott #1) and Los Angeles 1984 (boycott #2). Tokyo 2020 in 2021 will always be the ‘Pandemic Games.’
By a weird symmetry, Tokyo was awarded hosting rights during the same session (congress) which saw Thomas Bach elected as first German president of the International Olympic Committee.
Officials, journalists, and sponsors have flown to Japan informed by the need for patience with the need for testing, testing and retesting. This is in everyone’s interests: not only those participants but on the communities and countries to which they will return.
Fans, largely, will be absent. This will disturb sportsmen and women used to the inspirational fuel of crowds, however large or small. But the overwhelming majority of Olympic spectators gaze in via the medium of television anyway.
For better or worse, let the Games begin.