Lagos (Nigeria) – Watching the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics last Friday, I could not help but wonder whether Mankind knows what it is doing, organising these costly games with the goal of setting new “records.”
For many years leading up to last Friday’s start of the 29th Olympiad, tens of thousands of young men and women in all corners of the globe trained intensely, day and night, then ferociously competed in qualifying trials for a chance to make it to Beijing, there to win medals and break records. Well, I say to all of them that they are labouring in vain, because no human being is going to break any record already set by our cousins in the rest of the Animal Kingdom, and that is in every sport that you can think of.
The Olympiad’s Chinese hosts staged an elaborate show last Friday, summoning all the riches, tricks and wisdom of their 5,000-year-old civilisation. Sparkling explosions, a sea of drummers, acrobats, rockets and elaborate fireworks all heralded the Games’ start in which the host country aimed to set a record of its own with the costliest and most spectacular Olympics opening ceremony since the old Greeks invented it in 700 BC. But never mind.
During the march past the Bird’s Nest stadium by thousands of athletes from 205 countries and territories last Friday, one could see some very hefty men and women in the competing teams. Most probably, these were the wrestlers, boxers and discus throwers. Some of them appear to tip the scales at 150kg in body weight. That is still nothing compared to the body size of an African bush elephant Loxodonta africana. One specimen bull captured in Kenya was 13 feet tall and weighed 12 tonnes. Standing side by side with this bull, even the great sumo wrestlers Koinishiki and Akebono will look like toys. And that’s not even the record for animal body size, which is held by the Great Blue Whale Balaenoptera musculus. One specimen captured in 1947 weighed 187 tonnes; its tongue alone weighed 4 tonnes, and it had 15 tonnes of body fat, more than a Nigerian ten-tonne truck can carry!
Also on parade in Beijing on Friday were some exceptionally tall men. They were most probably basketballers. Well, they are not tall at all compared to the giraffe Giraffa Camelopardalis. One Masai bull captured in Kenya in 1957 was 19 feet tall, at least a third of that being the neck. Among the proudest athletes now in Beijing are the sprinters, some of whom are able to do the 100-metre “dash” in slightly under 10 seconds. That is not a record at all, to be frank. If some of our animal cousins are in the race, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt will not get even an aluminium medal. He cannot outrace a lion, which can run at 80 kph over short distances. Mr Bolt stands no chance against a cheetah Acinonyx jubatus, which can run the 100 metre race in under 5 seconds. This is not to mention the spine-tailed swift of India, which clocked 3.2 kilometres in 33 seconds. That means it can do the 100 meter race in 1.03 seconds! And that’s not even the animal record, because the peregrine falcon Falco peregrinus, while stooping from great heights often attains a speed of 220 kilometres per hour.
Athletes from Kenya, Ethiopia and Morocco stand to make Africa proud in Beijing with record-breaking middle and long distance runs. Unfortunately, they are not going to break any real records. No human 200 or 400-meters runner can beat the Arabian dog saluki in such a race, or for that matter the Afghan hound. Our great runners from Morocco know better than to compete against the North African ostrich Struthio camelus, which despite its bulk, easily clocks 72 kph over a middle distance. In fact, while a very fast human runner has run a mile’s race in under 4 minutes, a racing horse, with a rider on top, has done it in under 1.5 minutes. A horse has been known to run 160 kilometres in 8 hours 58 minutes, something no human runner can do. In fact, even the great Kenyan long-distance runner Kipchoge Keino cannot beat a Dromedary’s camel, Camelus dromedarius, in a real long distance race, because a camel was recorded to have covered 184 kilometres in 12 hours. The legendary Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila will not win even a wrought iron medal in a race against the Arctic tern Sterna hirundo; one such bird was tagged in Finland in June 1996 and 7 months later, it was caught in Australia, a journey of some 10,000 kilometres.
Many of the great human athletes now assembled at Beijing are going to claim gold medals for the long jump and high jump, all of them in vain. If the Great Gray Kangaroo Macropus giganteus of Australia were to compete at the Olympics, it will carry away all the medals, because it can run at 25 kph and leap more than 20 feet at a go. The man who will walk away with a gold medal for “high jump” in Beijing will have jumped only a few meters off the ground. You call that high jump? Look, in November 1973, a Ruppell’s vulture, Gyps ruppelli, collided with an aeroplane at 37,000 feet above the Ivorian city of Abidjan. Which medal do you want to give to this vulture? I also saw many long-legged men and women at the Beijing parade, probably there to compete in the hurdles. With the greatest respect to the late Ugandan policeman John Akii-bua, who did Africa real proud when he captured the 110-meter hurdles gold medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics, he wouldn’t have won an aluminium-alloy medal if a pronghorn antelope Antilocapra Americana were in the race. This antelope can run at 50 kph non-stop for 7 kilometres and leap for several meters every minute, a real hurdles racer.
Some of the largest haul of medals at Beijing will be collected by the swimmers from various countries, especially the swimming powerhouses such as USA, Russia, China and Germany. The truth, however is, whether in freestyle, backstroke, butterfly, medley or any other swimming race, no human swimmer stands any chance against the cosmopolitan sailfish Istiophorus plecopterus, which was once timed in a pond to have clocked 300 feet in 3 seconds. Alongside the swimmers, there are also men and women at the Olympics who claim to be expert divers. For where? If the emperor penguin Aptenodytes forsteri were to compete in this race, which one of them will win even a wooden medal? One such penguin was seen in 1990 to have dived 1,585 feet in the Antarctic Sea.
Some of the heftiest men and women in Beijing right now are there to compete in weight lifting. Now, whether it is snatch or clean and jerk, no human weightlifter can compete against an Indian elephant Elephas maximus, which does neat clean and jerks with heavy logs of trees. In fact, in proper physiological terms, the best measure of raw power is how much load you can carry in relation to your own body weight. If such a measure were adopted at the Olympics, no human being will win so much as a straw medal against the Rhinoceros beetle, which can lift a roll of dung 850 times its own body weight!
I was listening to a television commentator saying last Friday that athletes, sports officials, journalists and sports lovers have “swarmed” China for the Olympic Games. Does he know what a swarm is? The biggest human gathering ever was at the Hindu Maha Kumbh Mela festival when 30 million people bathed in the Ganges River in one day on January 23, 2001. Look, animals hold the record for a real swarm. One day in 1988, a locust swarm of Schistocerca gregaria was seen crossing the Red Sea from Yemen to Eritrea. It was 17 kilometres long, 12 kilometres wide and 4 kilometres deep, estimated to contain 100 billion individual locusts. How many people are there in all of China, “populous” though humans think it is?
I overheard some people saying at the weekend that US President George W. Bush should be awarded a gold medal for ingratitude. When he attended the Olympics’ opening ceremony last Friday, he took a swipe at the Chinese government for detaining human rights activists, suppressing rebellious Buddhist monks in Tibet and supporting the Sudanese government in Khartoum despite a Western uproar over events in Darfur. Even at that, Mr Bush cannot win an ingratitude medal in a competition against the black widow spider Latrodectus mactans. In this species, the female spider is four times bigger than the male. Immediately after sexual intercourse, the female grabs the male and eats it..
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Published by African Press International – API /Source: Daily Trust (Nigeria), by Mahmud Jega
