Fond memories of 1980 Games

Arusha. Here is the man who had fond memories of the only Olympic Games which Tanzanian competitors returned home smiling.

He is Zacharia Barie, a long distance runner who competed in the Moscow Olympics in 1980, but could not win the 10,000 metre race in the last lap.

The 61-year-old former athlete who hails from Dongobesh in the Mbulu highlands will not himself seek a revenge for the lost medal in Russia, 36 years ago, by running during the Rio Olympics opening on Friday in the coastal Brazilian city.

Instead, he will train the athletic team harder to ensure it does not return home empty-handed as the Tanzania Olympic ambassadors have done for nearly four decades now.

To cap his drills, he is praying for Tanzania to perform better this time around and come back with at least a medal to be proud of just like the country’s northern neighbours Kenya and Ethiopia which normally go for medal hauls in such competitions.

The soft-spoken Barie believes a medal for Tanzania is possible given the long training the team had - six months- unlike in the last Olympics in London in which it trained for only a few weeks.

For a couple of months, he has been training the four athletes who have qualified for the Rio Games and who are on the way to the venue. The training stint also involved others who could not qualify and left behind in the process.

In the training which has alternated between the high-altitude West Kilimanjaro and Arusha city, Barie has been assisting the chief coach for the athletics squad Francis John.

“Everything is going on well. I cannot say we are going to win a medal but anything can happen,” he told The Citizen at the Sheikh Amri Abeid Stadium in Arusha where the team has a brief training stint before flying to Dar es Salaam for a farewell party.

But he confided to this newspaper that there are chances of Tanzania winning a medal given the seriousness shown by the competitors themselves.

Unfortunately, he would not be travelling to Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian city famous for Samba and football, which will host the 41st Summer Olympics starting this weekend.

“I am not going because my travelling papers could not be processed and sent to Brazilian embassy in time”, he explained.

However, he is hoping to see the repeat of the 1980 Games in which Tanzania bagged two silver medals through Filbert Bayi (3,000m steeplechase) and Suleiman Nyambui in 5,000 metre race.

For him that was a glorious moment for Tanzania which had never any medal then despite having competed in three other Olympic Games then; 1964 in Tokyo, 1968 in Mexico City and 1972 in Munich.

Nearly all African countries boycotted the 1976 Games in Montreal, Canada over the participation of a team from the then apartheid South Africa.

Although the Moscow feat could have been attributed to another massive boycott, this time by the western countries and their allies, Barie says it was a fact that the 1970s and 1980s were a glorious moment for Tanzania athletics.

The country won significant number of medals from the Commonwealth Games and the All Africa Games. Those who brought honour to Tanzania included Filbert Bayi, Suleiman Nyambui, Norman Chihota, Gidamis Shahanga, himself and scores of others.

Barie said he missed a medal during the Moscow Olympics by a whisker. He qualified for the 10,000 metre final race after eliminations. However, he fell down after one of the runners knocked his foot with only six laps remaining.

“But I felt happy because Bay and Nyambui won us medals”, he said.

Two years later, during the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, Australia in 1982, he won a silver in 10,000 metres in the race which Tanzania dominated.

Gidamis Shahanga took gold, adding to his feat after the spectacular victory in Edmonton, Canada in 1978 in which the then little known athlete from Hanang took gold in the marathon race.

Barie is not the only athletics official travelling to Rio this month and who was there when Tanzania bagged medals in Moscow in 1980.

The other is Filbert Bayi, who is current secretary general of Athletics Tanzania (AT) and one of the medal winner that year.