There are broadly two pathways to Olympic success. One is that a well-resourced Olympics committee in a nation recognizes the value of sports in creating jobs and opportunities, builds pipelines for talent, invests in and encourages participation in sports, and elevates athletes as national symbols around which collective identities can be reified. The second is that people working within the limitations of societies that treat sports as superfluous contend with systematic constraints, even from their own Olympic committees, insulate themselves from the vagaries of the broader context, and drill down in pursuit of individual success. (A third is probably that rich countries bypass all of this and offer citizenship to any athlete willing to run for their flag—but that’s another article.) Unfortunately, around the world the latter story is more common than the former. It takes a lot of time, work and money to succeed in sports at the highest level, and the average athlete is likely to have an abundance of the first two and not enough of the latter. Advertising and sponsorships can make up the gap but only for truly standout athletes like Kenya’s Eluid Kipchoge or Faith Kipyegon. And this is where National Olympic Committees (NOCs) come in. A strong, well-resourced Olympic committee can fill the gap that scarce sponsorship creates by providing funding and access to facilities and opportunities for athletes, so the best talent rises to the top and represents the country at the international stage. This is also why there is a strong correlation between wealth and performance at the Olympics. The more money an Olympic committee has, the more sports they can spend money on in the interregnum between Olympiads; and the bigger the delegations they send every four years, the bigger the medal haul they bring back. The Olympic medal table, with its varied interpretations of who ranks where, is wielded like a weapon to say, ‘we’re so rich we can afford to spend money on sports you’ve never even heard of’. 

And the Olympics have always been political at both the national and the individual level, so eventually the politics breaks through. The Russian delegation for example is banned from the Olympics not just for the war in Ukraine but also for allegedly overseeing a systematic doping programme. Notably, the Israeli delegation is not—despite numerous international organizations decrying the genocide in Gaza. Questions of migration and race were at the tip of many European political tongues as the athletes of African descent featured prominently in the medal hauls of nations like Italy and France, where the far right has made major gains in the last five years. In Italy, a member of Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s party accused the gold medal winning volleyball team, led by an Italian of Nigerian descent, of not being Italian because ‘Italians have white skin’. And for many African athletes, political challenges arise from dealing with their own Olympic committees as they are plagued with the same issues that affect their broader political context.  

Perhaps no Olympic committee demonstrates this better than Nigeria. On paper, Nigeria is one of Africa’s largest economies and has the third highest number of millionaires per capita on the continent after South Africa and Egypt. But Nigeria is also a deeply unequal society with a notorious history of corruption and inefficiency. A Gini coefficient of 57.3 indicates that a few Nigerians are wealthy but most are not. In sports, Nigeria’s success is dominated by football. The first African nation to make it out of the group stages of a World Cup has been a consistent feature at that tournament, and they are one of two African nations to have ever won the Olympic gold in football (alongside Cameroon). Yet, at this Olympics, not only did Nigeria fail to medal in any sport, several of its athletes also expressed public frustration with their committee. Dual citizen Annette Echikunwoke competed for the US and won silver after being prohibited from competing in Japan because the Nigerian Olympic Committee failed to comply with the IOC’s drug testing schedules. Cyclist Ese Ukpeseraye borrowed a bicycle from the German contingent because she was allocated a space late in the games and did not have her own bike to compete with. Sprinter Favor Ofili was not allowed to run her preferred distance, the 100m, because the committee failed to register her for the race. And even though she was a finalist in the 200m she was wrongly placed in an unfavourable lane because there was no one at the games to advocate for her. A video of her sobbing in the arms of Kenyan Olympic officials after the race because there was no Nigerian official in the Green Zone has gone viral. But for the D’Tigresses, a notable outlier, Nigeria’s 2024 Olympics story was one of a toothless giant filled with latent yet woefully unfulfilled potential whimpering home empty handed. So why was basketball different?