IMANE KURDI The countdown is over. After seven years of preparation, the venues are ready, the tickets are sold, the athletes have arrived, and the 27th Summer Olympic Games have kicked off. London 2012 is on. I heard on the radio that three out of four people on the planet are expected to watch the Games – a statistic I find a little hard to believe, but let us give them the benefit of the doubt. What is sure is that more than 10,000 athletes from 205 countries will compete in 26 sports over the next two weeks. These include 19 athletes from Saudi Arabia and for the first time two women: Sarah Attar in the women's 800m and Wojdan Shahrkhani in judo. To my mind these Games are already a success for having achieved the major landmark of every country participating fielding teams that include both men and women – and about time too! It is hard to believe that it has taken so long for women to be fully included in the Olympic Games. Let us forget about all the hype, all the grumbling about traffic, the convoluted ticketing process, the overly-aggressive sponsorship that has locked out local tradespeople, the (thankfully averted) strikes of border officials, the shocking mistake of playing the wrong country's national anthem (and not just any wrong country but playing South Korea's anthem to welcome the North Korean football team!), the glitzy razzmatazz and the political deal-making, and all the other sideshows that take the attention away from the fact that athletes are incredible people who will awe us over the next two weeks with their physical prowess, their mental discipline and the emotion of seeing a life-long dream come true. Let us focus on the beauty of sport and on the excitement of competition and hope that the Games fulfill their motto to “inspire a generation". If ever a generation needed to be inspired it is this one, be it in the host nation where the government has warned that economic austerity is there to stay, or closer to home where indolence is in danger of becoming a national disease. I was saddened to read a piece in this very paper this week that quoted damning statistics by the World Health Organization: over 68 percent of Saudi Arabia's population lead inactive lifestyles and 68.3 percent of adults never get any exercise at all, putting the country in the bottom three worldwide with only Malta and Swaziland having less active lifestyles that Saudi Arabia. Sport of course makes you fit and healthy and a lack of sport makes you more likely to become ill and shortens life expectancy, but that is only a small part of what sport can do for a generation. Looking at the athletes competing in the London Olympics, you can see how sport demands hard work, concentration, discipline, motivation, teamwork, ambition and commitment, but also humility, camaraderie and generosity, the very qualities that make not just people but countries successful. If we want forthcoming generations to do better than their elders, and clearly we should, then sport is a crucial part of the way forward. Looking forward just four years to the next Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, I hope that Sarah Attar and Wojdan Shahrkhani become trailblazers and inspire young girls to get into sports so that the number of Saudi female athletes competing will have tripled or quadrupled or more. But mostly I hope that parents will begin to see that doing well in sport is just as important as getting good grades in academic subjects, that local authorities will pour more funds into encouraging young people to get fit and healthy and participate in sports and that cultural attitudes will change to see sport as a vital part of daily life. Getting more boys and girls into sport is not a luxury but a necessity, and girls deserve the opportunity to become sportswomen as much as boys do. This does require an attitude shift, and not just from parents unwilling to let their girls take part in sports activities but also from international sports bodies. So I applaud the decision of FIFA taken on July 5 to allow women footballers to play matches while wearing a hijab, though this is for the moment just a trial period. Until now, players were automatically disqualified by the referee if they showed up on the pitch wearing a headscarf, as happened to the whole Iranian football team in June 2011 in a qualifying match for the London Olympics. The decision to allow women footballers to play with headscarves was greeted with some dismay in parts of Europe, as it was seen as going against the secular nature of sports. Ensuring that dress codes comply with safety is one thing – Wojdan Shahrkhani will not be allowed to wear a hijab to play judo because the veil could strangle her during a tackle – but excluding women because they dress differently is another thing. If you want to encourage women from all over the world to play, tweaking the rules a little bit so that they can do so whilst adhering to their personal religious beliefs only serves to make sport more universal and that after all is part of what sport is all about. As Queen Elizabeth II declares the Summer Olympics open, let us open our minds to the benefits of sport and hope that the Games will inspire a new generation of athletes in the Arab world. – Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
