PARIS — The swimmer in Lane Seven was twenty-four months old when the most accidentally famous athlete in the history of Africa nearly drowned in the Olympic pool. That was in Sydney, Australia, in the antipodal springtime of the year 2000, an unforgettable afternoon when respect lapped ridicule and losing turned out to be the greatest victory of all.
The hero that day Down Under was an underqualified freestyler from Equatorial Guinea, a malevolent but oil-soaked dictatorship that is the poorest little rich country in the world. Eric Moussambani Malonga had learned to swim in a tropical river, then honed his skills, such as they were, in a hotel pool that was only twenty metres long. In Sydney, compelled to swim five times that far, he almost went down under himself.
The policy of the International Olympic Committee and its parasitic federations is to throw a little cash at the world’s most benighted nations and then to welcome two or three of their swimmers and sprinters to every Games in the name of Baron de Coubertin, Coca-Cola, and a display of unidentifiable flags. For the athletes, the result is four years of sweat and dreaming compressed to ten seconds on the track or half a minute in the water and then a plane ride home.
In Sydney, Eric Moussambani flipped this condescending sacrament on its head. Swimming solo after rivals from Tajikistan and Nigeria false-started, he foundered and floundered and nearly slipped beneath the waves during his hundred-metre heat, but the crowd roared its encouragement and somehow urged him to the far end of the pool.
Eric had just kept swimming, swimming, swimming; he had not given up. For demonstrating this humble yet elusive human quality, he was lauded as a touchstone of tenacity, gifted with the monicker “Eric the Eel,” and lavished with our century’s dubious gifts of celebrity and fame.
“Two minutes in the water changed my life forever,” he told me when I visited him in his capital city of Malabo a couple of years later.
“Despite his pain, despite his fear, Eric Moussambani persevered before the watching eyes of the world. He knew what he wanted — to finish the race — and nothing was going to stop him,” wrote the editors of The Youth Bible in one of many books that held the apostle Eric up to the world like the newborn Simba in The Lion King. “The Canaanite woman in Matthew 15:21-28 showed a similar perseverance. She loved her daughter, she wanted desperately for her to be healed, and she knew Jesus could do it.”
So there was some pretty puissant history in the water when the entrant from Equatorial Guinea, in a shocking pink swimsuit, walked toward block number seven at La Défense on Thursday morning for the second of ten qualifying heats in the men’s 50-metre freestyle at the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad.
At the Olympic Games, everybody is a gold medalist until the gun goes off. Hopefuls from six other Third World countries were in the same heat as the solid, tattooed young man from Malabo, watched by a thundering audience that had come to hail their Gallic favourites and, for the same price, to see if anyone would drown.
The Equatoguinean in fuchsia was named Higinio Ndong Obama Nkara but on Facebook he calls himself Stevi. Obama is his father’s surname, he told me with a chuckle after the race; he’s not named for the American presidente. (When Stevi was born in 1998, Barack O. still was serving in the Illinois Senate.) His page is filled with inspirational axioms that could have been lifted from The Youth Bible: “It’s always night somewhere and there’s always a sun rising on the horizon,” and “Our greatest glory is not in never failing but in rising each time we fall.”
Though only a toddler when it happened, Stevi knew well his countryman’s history and called him, in Spanish, “one of the valientes.” But The Eel was not in attendance at La Défense; at 46, his usefulness as a merchandisable icon seems to have elapsed. Neither did I spy anyone in the arena waving the four-coloured bandera of what once was the only Spanish possession in sub-saharan Africa, a flag that features a spreading Ceiba tree and the motto “Unity Peace Justice” that, in our sad world, is honoured mostly in the breach.
At twenty past eleven, they lined up on the blocks and this time there were no false starts. Higinio Ndong Obama Nkara held his own well enough and he never was in the slightest jeopardy of sinking but swimmers from the Marshall Islands and Congo-Brazzaville pulled ahead. At the end of the flat-out sprint down the waterway the land of Unity Peace Justice was third with a stopwatch of 28.42 seconds, which almost exactly equalled the winning time in the 50-yard freestyle swimming race at St. Louis in 1904. First, second, and third hardly mattered anyway – nobody from the second heat is going to the 50-metre finals.
“Four years of dreaming and thirty seconds of swimming,” I told Higinio the Haddock in the Mixed Zone a few minutes later, nimbly quoting myself.
“My goal is to get a little bit better each time,” he smiled. “In every competition, I am getting closer to the medals.”