EAGLE EYE this week, All of a sudden, a lot of attention is being paid to the issue of sports stars competing with wrong ages in their personal profiles.
That’s putting it mildly, because the exact expression for this misnomer should be ‘an athlete falsifying his/her age in order to compete at a level he/she would normally be above and not eligible for.’
Call it whatever you would – cheating, error, falsification, fabrication, discrepancy, etc – the issue of sports stars competing under wrong ages is not new in Nigeria. However, before now, we thought cases of ‘false age’ could be found only among footballers … until a furore was raised early this week by the integrity unit of World Athletics (AIU).
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All hell was suddenly let loose, and everybody is now running round in circles, helter-skelter, as if ghosts have invaded the community.
All of a sudden, we are waking up from slumber, but some stakeholders are quick to point out that we are all to blame. Wow!
I look back through the years and inevitably come to an agreement that we all must search ourselves (journalists inclusive). It’s time for deep and truthful inward assessment, especially regarding our age-grade football.
It took a ban by FIFA in the 90s to shed some light on the scourge of age falsification that is rocking Nigeria’s roles in age-grade football. Sadly, instead of FIFA coming frontally out to slam us for ‘age cheating,’ they tagged it mildly – ‘age irregularities.’
It was an euphemism that apparently did not allow us feel the true impact of FIFA’s punitive measures. So, we continue churning out in our under-17 national team players who left secondary school seven years earlier. Some even had a child or two, and some were members of the armed forces … at the age of 17!
There was the case of a ’17-year-old revelation’ who was being fed with growth beverages when he signed for a club in Belgium, but instead of getting tall as expected, he started adding weight and bulging along his waist line. There was another who was soon found to be six years younger than his twin sister. All in the name of ‘reduce your age in order to fit in when your breakthrough comes.’
That has often been the explanation given by youth football managers, grassroots coaches and even age-grade national team handlers. They argue that the average Nigerian under-17 lad would be ‘too small’ to withstand challenges on the international stage, so they have to look for ‘young looking mature players’ who have gained stability by playing for league clubs in the country.
“It won’t be too bad if we get a 20-year-old player for the Golden Eaglets. At least just three years’ difference is not too much,” has become the common refrain among coaches of football academies and players’ agents across the country. So, we always get ‘young looking old players’ that shine at the FIFA U17 World Cup but fail to step up into the senior cadre. While Lionel Messi is still winning trophies in God’s Own Country, those two who were with him on the podium of the best three players at Holland 2005 World Youth Championship retired long ago.
Unfortunately for CAF and FIFA, even their revolutionary recourse to MRI scans have turned out to be only marginally correct, not foolproof. So, the scourge of ‘fake age’ continues in Nigeria’s youth football sector – and the alarm bell is now also ringing in track and field!
However, as the decibels rise, that veritable verdict by an observer comes up once again: “We all are to blame!” Again, I agree.
Two instances led me to that conclusion, and they both came during my time as a full-time secondary school teacher from 2020 up until October this year.
First was the NAPPSS Sports Festival of 2021 (organised by National Association of Proprietors of Private Secondary Schools) and this year’s MTN Secondary Schools’ Athletics Classics (which held simultaneously at UNILAG and YabaTech).
During both competitions, I observed the influx of ex-students or dropouts representing the competing schools. The irony of it all is that teachers, sports masters, coaches and proprietors will argue vehemently that their candidate is within the age cadre even when his/her physical appearance indicates otherwise.
Much stated – the next poser should be: How do we get out of the miry clay? As the philosopher would say, “Once you raise objection, you must profer a solution.” So, we must all say kudos to National Sports Commission (NSC) for reading the riot act to Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN); but it cannot start and end there!
We need to start organising school sports festivals on a monthly basis across all local governments in each state, expand them iinto quarterly competitions of the same level across the six-geo polical zones, and then up to the national level annually.
This would put in place a progressive sequence in the discovery of talents from secondary schools (not just in football and athletics, but all sports).
This approach would entrench thorough and regular documentation of data, biometrics, profiles and results, thereby removing the possibility of alteration, cheating, falsification, error or adjustment along the line.
Anything short of this indepth strategy would be a case of merely paying lip service to the task of solving an already endemic stigma. It’s not enough to read the riot act, nor is it enough to look for scapegoats – let’s go to the nitty-gritty of the mysery in order to solve this mystery and come out with a success story.
