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Malachi, just another budding athlete rallying to foreign flag
You cannot help but feel sorry for Malachi Davis. He claims his British passport birthright, flies in from Californian sunshine to a grey chill Manchester and wins himself a place on the British Olympic team, collecting abuse and insults along the way. And after going to all this trouble, poor old Malachi starts to run nearly a second slower than he managed earlier in the year. But for Davis, it is not too high a price to pay for the chance to appear in the Greatest Show on Earth. "It’s every athlete’s dream to compete at the Olympics," said Davis. "When I was told I had a chance to compete at the British trials, I jumped at it. I’d barely qualified for the US trials, and, at 26, I was faced with a choice, either race here in Manchester or my career would be in jeopardy." So Davis will turn out in Athens under a flag of convenience, a relay squad makeweight who does not know the name of his new prime minister and who has been dubbed "the Californian carpetbagger". Yet Davis is not the first, and however embarrassing his presence in the team might be, he will surely not be the last. Almost 20 years earlier barefooted South African distance runner Zola Budd set her first UK all-comers’ record: for the time it took her to obtain a British passport. Budd’s claim to UK nationality was through her London-born grandfather. Davis’s came through his British-born mum, and took some six months to arrange. But he might do well to heed Budd’s hindsight. "At the time, I thought it was the best decision to come over to Britain and run in those Games," Budd, aged 38, now a housewife and mother back in South Africa, says. "But I was not prepared for it, mentally or physically. I was accepted as an athlete - I was not accepted as a Briton." Davis is unlikely to suffer similar problems. And if he were to win a medal in a GB vest, he’s certain to be embraced as one of ours. Greg Rusedski’s Canadian accent was overlooked for long enough for him to win the BBC’s sports personality of the year award, and London-born Lennox Lewis was a true Brit when he won the world heavyweight title despite having won his Olympic gold medal with a maple leaf on his chest. Half of the British triathlon team competing at Athens speaks with a notably Antipodean accent, Michelle Dillon having previously represented Australia as a track athlete. In fact, Britain has always welcomed winners to its shores - most blatantly when the entire gold medal-winning ice hockey team in 1936 was made up of émigré Canadians. In more recent times, political unrest and sporting grant aid have tended to be the major driving forces behind switches of nationality. In Olympic sports, what was called "the Zola Budd rule", which required some period of residency, has been overtaken now by an absolute requirement to hold a country’s passport, a factor which prevents Yamile Aldama, one of the world’s leading triple jumpers who is married to a Scot and has a British-born son, from representing Britain. After four frustrating years, the former Cuban has now taken Sudanese citizenship to enable her to compete in Athens, despite her home address being in London. Sporting visits often lead to claims for asylum. At last year’s world youth athletics championships in Canada, 10 teenage members of the Ethiopia and Sudan teams chose not to take the flight home. The break-up of the old Soviet empire led to top-flight athletes seeking to represent other countries, too, with Israel recruiting several world-class competitors and Australia benefiting from Russian talent, including Tatiana Grigorieva, the pole vault silver medallist in Sydney. But if the competitor’s former country raises objections, the process can be elongated to a cruel extent. Kenya-born Wilson Kipketer was by far the world’s finest 800 metre runner in the mid-1990s. Yet a move to Denmark in 1990 and marriage to a Danish woman could not prevent Kenyan objections barring his way to the 1996 Olympics. The Kenyans’ attitude towards Kipketer has been somewhat moderated of late, though, as a stream of distance runners has opted to change allegiance, often in deals with Gulf states. The suggestion, always refuted, has been that senior Kenyan sports officials have accepted bribes in return for not objecting to the transfers. Qatar, though, had their fingers burned through the recruitment of virtually an entire Bulgarian weight-lifting team before Sydney - they tested positive for drugs. But still the recruitment drive goes on and Qatar got luckier when last year, Stephen Cherono changed his name to Saif Saeed Shaheen, and won the 3,000m steeplechase world title for his adopted country in Paris. Kenya got a new track at Eldoret for its co-operation and Cherono was paid a $1 million gold medal bonus. It is not something of which Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president approves. "From a moral point of view we should avoid this transfer market in athletes," said Rogge. "What we don’t like is athletes being lured by large incentives by other countries and giving them a passport when they arrive at the airport." Shaheen is banned from running in Athens as he has yet to serve the three-year qualification period laid down by the IOC. "Many athletes when they get money, they disappear after a few years," Shaheen says, reflecting on his change in circumstance. "For me it will be different. I will be around for the Beijing Olympics in 2008." For Shaheen, for Aldama and for Malachi Davis, it is the Games that are the thing. |
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