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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2009 > October > 03
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Rio deserves Games; Obama doesn’t deserve the rips
If you look at the bigger world picture, Rio de Janeiro is the right choice for the 2016 Olympic Games.
In the past, those five interlocking Olympic rings served more like coils of barbed wire fencing that kept both South America and Africa from hosting the world’s premier sporting event.
Granted most of the nations on those two continents still aren’t capable of hosting the Games, but a place like Brazil — whose rising economy and political clout have made it a world player — certainly is.
Prior to the IOC vote to award the games — to either Rio, Chicago, Madrid or Tokyo — one of the most persuasive arguments came from Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who simply held up a world map peppered with markers designating all the previous Olympic host cities.
The biggest clusters were in Europe and North America.
South America was bare.
This was a chance to truly make the games world wide and open them to an entire — and deserving — continent.
Prior to Friday’s vote, many thought Chicago was the slight front-runner, but instead the “Second City” came in fourth. It was bumped in the first round of voting. Tokyo went in round two and then Rio easily KOd Madrid.
Chicago had several factors going against it.
— There’s still a true dislike of America in many pockets of the world and I think that played into some votes.
— The United States Olympic Committee alienated much of the IOC earlier this year when it announced plans to launch its own cable network even though the IOC hadn’t embraced it. Weeks later — realizing the universal ill will it had created — the USOC shelved the plan, but by then the damage was done
— There are some in the IOC still smarting from the way they were exposed for the kick backs they required from Salt Lake officials to give the 2002 Winter Games to Utah. They were blasted in the U.S. Senate and in the media.
As for those yakking heads ripping President Barack Obama for going to Denmark to lobby for the U.S. and Chicago — his adopted home town — how about torching that talk with the Olympic flame. They batter him no matter what he does.
Although the bid had the odds stacked against it, Obama’s trip was worth the try.
The heads of state of the other three nations in the bidding for the game were there and in the past that sometimes has worked. Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair was in Singapore when London got the nod for the 2012 games.
And in 2007 when the 2014 Winter Olympics were going to be awarded, then Russian president Vladimir Putin was in Paris to provide political muscle that helped get his nation the Games.
Reports from Denmark had some IOC members saying the denial of Chicago was not a rejection of Obama. Richard Pound, one of the IOC heavyweights from Canada, told the New York Times that other cities did all they could to knock Chicago out early.
“I’m sure that a lot of the political maneuvering was based on the fact that Obama was probably hoping to come, and was coming ,so ‘We’ve got to keep Chicago out of play or we’re all dead.
“I think (Obama) made a lot of friends here, gained a lot of respect.”
TweetCOLUMN: African Gold - The Legend of Ramadhan Ndayisaba
John Derr has been around a long time — he’s coached prep football for a quarter century at eight different schools across the Miami Valley and in Florida — and yet he’s never experienced anything like this.
“You ever see that movie, ‘The Natural’?” asked the Belmont coach as he sat in the school’s cramped football office. “You know, where somebody just walks in off the street? Well, that’s kind of what Rahm’s story is. Like something straight out of the movies.”
Just as The Natural’s Roy Hobbs shattered the scoreboard lights with a mammoth home run, Ramadhan Ndayisaba showed he has a knack for the spectacular, as well.
“I took a football to track practice because they said this kid could kick,” said Jackie Fails, Belmont’s track coach and an assistant football coach. “I’d seen him just dance with a soccer ball, but I didn’t know about kicking. I tossed him the ball and said, ‘Let me see you kick, Man.’”
The recollection made Fails grin: “BOOM, he kicked it over that (three-story) school building over there. So I go, ‘Can you do that again?’ He just nodded and BOOM, this time he kicked the ball real high and it landed on the school roof.
“I was shocked and I remember saying, “Man, you done lost the ball.’ Right then I knew we’d found ourselves a kicker.”
Derr remembers Fails hustling into the locker room, saying: “Coach, you got to come look at the African kid. He can kick the crap out of the ball.’
“When I got there, I saw he not only could kick, but he could do it with either leg. He’s ambidextrous. And he can kick on the run. He’s an athlete. Instantly he made out kicking game 10 times more versatile than it ever was.”
In the past three years, Belmont has gone 2-8, 2-8 and then last year, with Derr sidelined first by hip replacement surgery, then a broken leg, the under-manned Bison went 0-9
“Don’t you think I deserve a little luck,” Derr chuckled. “I’ve never had anything like this happen to me, but God can’t constantly keep kicking me in the head . I think he finally said, ‘Here John, you deserve a break.’”
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COMING TO AMERICA
It’s almost as if Ramadhan finally got the same message, as well.
In 1993 — the year after he was born in Burundi — his nation erupted in civil war after Melchior Ndadaye, the leader of the Hutu party, won the country’s first-ever democratic election and promptly was assassinated by Tutsi soldiers.
Parliament elected another Hutu to the presidency and immediately he and the Rwanda president were killed when their plane was shot down.
The ethnic violence that lasted for more than a decade cost at least 300,000 lives in Burundi and displaced two million people.
Ramadhan’s family fled briefly to Congo and then Tanzania, where he lived in a refugee camp most of the first 15 of his 17 years. He said his grandparents stayed behind in Burundi and “were killed by the soldiers.”
Life in the camp, he said was “real bad. It was crowded. There was fighting,. People worried about the war (back home.)”
When he, his parents, two older brothers and younger sister — with the help of an aid group — finally were brought to the United States, he said they came to Dayton.
None of the family spoke English — though Ramadhan spoke six other languages — and they knew little about everyday life in the United States.
“I knew about 50 Cent, Eminem, Beyonce …and Arnold,” he said
Arnold?
He nodded: “In California, the governor. He’s got a lot of movies.”
The family flew into Dayton on a wintery January day and Ramadhan remembers being instantly perplexed:
“It was cold and the ground was all white. It looked like sugar. I said, ‘What’s going on here? Where is this from?’ And they said, ‘The sky.’ It was snow time.”
Once he got in front of a TV, he said he was puzzled again when he saw an NFL play-off game:
“I said, ‘What kind of game is this?’ I had never seen it before. There’s nothing like it in Africa. They told me it is called football. and I asked if I could try playing this football.”
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BECOMING A LEGEND
With the help of Fails — who picked him up and brought him back to his North Main Street home each day — Ramadhan worked on his kicking over the summer.
At the same time, he learned English — through Belmont’s English as a Second Language classes and banter with his teammates — and thanks to both the lingo and his strong legs, he’s begun to carve out his niche in his new country.
“He was a little sketchy with rules at first,” smiled teammate Nathan Henderson, who likely was referring to the Greenon game when Ramadhan decided to run the ball out of the end zone rather than punt. He was promptly tackled on the two yard line and Greenon quickly scored.
But as he’s grasped some of the complexities of the game — while kicking a field goal and five extra points for his under-manned 1-4 team — he’s also become a bit of a legend.
“We have him listed as a running back and a kicker, but he’s not going to run much,” said assistant coach Kipp Grubaugh. “We don’t want to get him hurt at running back. Not with that foot of his. It’s the real deal. It’s real gold. African gold.”
Although the Bison lost 35-0 to Cincinnati Schroeder last week, Ramadhan was honored.
“Being able to run and kick rugby style — one he kicked with the left leg, another with the right — he personally saved about three of those kicks from getting blocked,” Derr said. ” We made him one of our (two) players of the week”
Ramadhan was proud enough of that that he convinced the coaches to let him bring the game film home so he could show it to his mom and dad, who, he said, work all day sewing clothing items.
Tonight, October 2, they’ll be at Welcome Stadium when Belmont plays Ponitz Tech.
“It’s the first game they’ve ever seen,” Ramadhan said with a smile. “I hope they know what they’re seeing.”
They will. They know they’re seeing a kid who deserved a break and when he got it, he turned it into gold.
African gold.
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