The role MKO Abiola played in my career – Amike

The President of the Nigeria Olympian Association, Henry Amike, who holds a 29-year-old national record in 400m hurdles, speaks about his career as an athlete in this interview with

ALLWELL OKPI

You started with football, why did you switch to athletics?

I started with football in the 1970s. Then the junior national team was called Greater Tomorrow. We were training on the training pitch outside the National Stadium, Lagos and an athletics coach, Tobias Igwe, who was with the National Sports Commission saw the way I was running with the ball. After the game he asked if I had tried athletics. I said I had tried it in primary school and stopped. He then said they were going to do trials the next day that I could join them. I went there, ran 800m and I won. That was the beginning of my journey in track and field. He told me to keep coming for training. After some time, I represented Lagos State. We went for National School Sports competition in Owerri. That was where I started getting to national limelight. Later, I was invited to the national team as an Invited Junior Athlete. In 1979, I won the Oluyole National Sports Festival in 800m. Then I was invited to the senior team and we were camped for the Olympics Games in Moscow.

Did you regret dropping football for track and field?

I’m happy I didn’t continue with football. There was no money in football then as it is today. Also, it was difficult to combine football with academics. It was easier to do it with athletics.

What were the high points in your athletics career?

The high points in my career were the times I represented Nigeria and the times I competed in Nigeria. I ran the national championships and I won 12 times. Talking about international competitions, my best performance was when I came second in the World Cup, in Barcelona, Spain. In that race, a lot of people had counted me out. Few weeks to the championship, I became very ill. We came for the national and the African championship in Nigeria. I was hit by malaria. I ran the African champions and I won. That night, I went down with malaria. I lost weight and looked like someone who had AIDS. I was dropped from the team because the World Cup was barely two weeks away. On my way back to the US, I was fortunate to have flown on board the same aircraft as late Chief MKO Abiola. He saw me and asked, ‘Why are you not in Barcelona?’ I said, ‘I was not feeling too well and because of that I was dropped from the team.’ He said, ‘It is better you go there and come last than not going at all.’ It was a British Airways flight and when we got to London, he called the then president of IAAF, Lame Diack and said, ‘There is a Nigerian here who won the African championship in Lagos and he is not in Barcelona. Why?’ So from there I had to go to Barcelona. When I got to Barcelona, I was really challenged by what MKO Abiola did for me. I said to myself, ‘I will give it my all’. I started training again and because I went late and they already had eight finalists, I was given the ninth lane and nobody expected anything from me. But I surprised the world. I could have come first. I was close to the tape and gas finished, I came second. It was not my fastest race but it was my greatest moment. My joy overflowed. Because of me, MKO came to Barcelona and I went and said,‘I can’t believe I did this. To you and to God, I give thanks’ and he said, ‘Thank God’ and gave me something. I must tell you, MKO was a great man.

What about other competitions such as the 1984 Olympics?

The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles was where I had the saddest moment in my career. I really don’t like talking about it. I was ready; I believed I could win a medal because I had a good semifinal. But unfortunately, while I was in the second position, as I saw in the video the next day, my leg smashed the seventh hurdle stick and I went tumbling. I sat on the floor and looked at the finish line and I told myself ‘get up and run’. People were trying to carry me out but I stood up and ran the slowest time in the 400m hurdles final at the Olympics. My name is there that I finished the race in the slowest time ever at the Olympics. I strained my hamstring and as a result I could not run in the final with the Nigerian 4x400m relay team. That cost me another medal. I set the national record at the World Championship in Rome in 1987 and the record still stands today. It was not my best race but I set my best time. I had a bad start. I slipped on the starting block. So I was running from behind. By the time I finished the race and looked at the clock, it was 48:50 secs. I couldn’t believe it.

How do you feel knowing that the record you set 29 years ago has not been broken?

It shows you that there is a problem with the attitude of our athletes. It is not the management or the coaches that will make you become a great athlete. It’s your attitude towards performance. When I was growing up we had an adage: ‘train hard, win easy’. But today they want to use drugs and win easy. Hurdles is a technical event. If you like use all the drugs in this world, you can’t win if you don’t have the techniques. A lot of people have been telling me to go into coaching but I’ve refused because Nigerian coaches are not well remunerated. I won’t say because I want to coach, I won’t feed my family or have the standard of life I want. It takes a lot to produce world beaters. A typical Nigerian coach trains about 50 athletes at the same time because he wants to make little money from each of them. I’m not putting them down but you cannot get the best out of your athletes that way. Each athlete needs attention. You’ll notice that when an athlete goes abroad and comes back after six months, they run faster. It is not that the coaches over there are better, it is just that they are able to give one-on-one attention to the athletes and they can handle their problems scientifically and physically. Abroad, there are different people that handle different aspects of the training of an athlete. You have a coach for weight; one for physical activities; another for mental wellbeing; another for the physics of the body and others handling other aspects. Here an athlete might want different people to handle him but he can’t afford it. We have a lot of talents in Nigeria. We need government and private sector to know that athletes need the best. They need accommodation, transportation, welfare and medical support. When athletes train, they lose a lot of calories and there are drugs that help their bodies to rebuild. But here they eat a lot of food but it is not broken down. They need vitamins to break the food down in their bodies but those vitamins are expensive. When they are not able to get these things that would help them perform well, they resort to using drugs.

Are you saying Nigerian athletes don’t match their American and European counterparts because of the difference in the training they get?

Yes. All over the world, athletes go from place to place to train in different months of the year. These athletes become superstars and we see them and say we can be like. The truth is that we can’t. There has been a lot of investment in them them. Today, we have Blessing Okagbare doing what she is doing. It cost a lot of money to get her there. I know the former Governor of Delta State spent some on her; the Athletic Federation of Nigeria president also did. She now has sponsors. You have to get to a certain level to get sponsors. When we were running, we were very lucky because we had scholarships. Then we got vitamins free of charge in school. We had coaches and everything at our disposal. Then it was common to see at least a Nigerian in the finals of different events at international competitions. Now our athletes don’t even want to go to school. When they run for a while they want to make money. Things are different now, even in the US now, you have to pay your coach to train you. Then I wasn’t paying my coach. My scholarship covered my coaches’ remuneration too. When I was in Nigeria, I was not running very well. My best time was 52.8 seconds. That is very slow. By the time I got to the US, in less than one year, I started running under 50 seconds, under 49 seconds. That was the transition I went through.

You must have been upset by the news that eight Nigerian athletes who participated in the Brazzaville 2015 All Africa Games were banned for doping?

I got the news before it was published in the papers and I felt very bad. I know that some of these athletes train very hard and because they know that age is not on their side, they resort to taking drugs. Some of these athletes are already over 25, some over 30 and they know that if they finish their career on the track without winning anything and getting money to build a house for instance, and without education, they would become nobody. We were lucky that we went to school and we made some money when we were running and we built houses. It’s a shame that Nigerian athletes indulge in the use of drugs.

Looking at the level of Nigeria’s preparations for Rio Olympics, do you think we are on track to win medals?

To be sincere with you, the system in Nigeria is not the best for anybody to win Olympic medals. But the athletes know their target and I’m sure they are training towards it. The AFN has opened its camp because the AFN president believes that the athletes need to be in camp to have a sense of belonging. With the change I don’t know whether it’s been easy for them to get financial support. But the Olympics will not wait for anybody. It is every four years. Our problem in Nigeria is that we want results but we don’t want to plan. We need to support our athletes in a four-year cycle. By now, we should have known our ‘possibles’ and our ‘probables’ and invest more in the ‘possibles’. There should be categorisation. When we were running, they used to give us monthly allowances and quarterly bonuses. Government officials used to come to the US to meet us. When they give your roommate certain bonuses and they don’t give you, you will work harder to set the records he had set. So we had a lot of people coming home and doing very well because they know if they don’t do it, they won’t get bonuses. Let them implement that again.

Since you’re not coaching, what are you doing now?

I’m not a coach even though I’ve done the course and I have Level-3 coaching certificate. I can coach if I want to. Right now I’m into facilities build stadiums; pitches and tracks, and I’m into sports management; track and field specifically.