All the winter sports that Africans are missing

With the coming of the winter and the snow, many of the sporting events associated with snow and ice will be in full sway. At a time like this, I think of my country, Ghana, and of Africa, and how we will be completely left out of this great sporting tradition. Nature has not given us snow (except for a little ice on top of Mount Kilimanjaro and some snow in South Africa) and so we have nothing to do with sporting events that take place on snow. We can manufacture artificial ice but that is not going to be enough to give us a tradition of ice sports, especially since we have more important matters to deal with than buying ice making machines. In the 70s in Ghana, we heard that a hotel in Abidjan had an ice-skating rink. We thought that was a sickening luxury that should not be entertained in a poor African country!

When you have lived all your life in Africa, you are fed so much football that you do not really appreciate other games. When you move to Europe or North America, winter sports, Ice hockey (what is really called “Hockey” – not what we play in Ghana) and American Football will look very strange to you. You will wonder why people spend their time on such boring sports. But, gradually, you begin to understand these “strange” sports. If you are a lover of sports, you quickly begin to see that some of these games are far more exciting than the football you grew up with in Africa.

Since I love sports, it did not take me long, when I came to Europe some 30 years ago, to see how really exciting Ice-Hockey is. And if you live in a country where there is a devotion to the game that will put religious worshippers to shame, you are easily drawn to it too. You quickly understand the passion of the fans. Truth be told, I still love football but I now think ice hockey is a far more exciting game. It is faster, it requires a lot more skill, it has far more strategies, it is more energy sapping and it requires far more training to become a skilful player than becoming a football player. Once you understand the off side rule, icing, power-play, box play, face-offs and the rest of the rules, you will get hooked too.

A similar phenomenon has been reported to me by friends in the USA with regards to American Football. Once you understand the rules and the strategies you start to appreciate the game. And when you see the crowds rising to the occasion and the individual players who score a good throw thumping their chests in jubilation, you will understand that there is an excitement that you will never get living in Africa.

But my present article will concentrate on the sporting events that have to do with snow and ice. There are so many I cannot describe all here. But one thing is certain: we are missing a lot in Africa!

FIS (Fédération Internationale de Ski) is the world body that controls all skiing sports. It has a membership of 123 countries including Ghana! It was formed as far back as 1924 and is headquartered in Oberhofen am Thunersee, Switzerland. Its website lists all the sporting events it controls. They are close to a hundred and are divided among several disciplines. There is Alpine Skiing (Alpine Combined, Downhill, Super-G, Giant Slalom, Slalom); Nordic Skiing (Cross-country skiing, Ki Jumping, Nordic Combined, Ski Flying); Freestyle Skiing (Moguls, Aerials, Skicross, Half-pipe); Snowboarding (Parallel Giant Slalom, Parallel Slalom, Snowboard cross, Half-pipe); Grass skiing, Speed skiing, Telemark skiing. Some of these are of recent origin and begun as young people playing snow games.

The one that is likely to attract you on television is the slalom where the competitors ski downhill at great speed while trying to negotiate between sticks placed at strategic distances. It is a tricky one as you can easily slip and miss the sticks. It requires great technical skills.

The Downhill is often over 3000 metres (more than 3 kilometres) and is a race of raw speed. Some of the professional men have been clocked at 130 kph! That is faster than is allowed on many motorways in the world. Because of its speed, it is the crown jewel of Alpine skiing. But this great speed means accidents can be fatal and there have been many over the years. Perhaps the most painful and saddest one of recent years is that of the Austrian, Ulrike Maier, a two-time world champion in the Super-G. She was doing the downhill in the Kandahar course at the 1994 Garmisch Classic when, less than 20 seconds from the finish, and at a speed of 105 kph, her right ski went awry and she crashed and broke her neck. She died of her injuries.

Nordic skiing is mostly long-distance (or Cross Country) skiing. There are various distances and different styles of skiing. Norway has always dominated long distance skiing. Varieties of distance skiing include the mass start where all the competitors start at once and Pursuit where each competitor starts at specific minutes after the last person to leave the gates.

In Ski jumping, the athletes descend a specially constructed take-off ramp, jump from the edge with as much power as they can generate, and "fly" as far as possible down a steeply sloped hill. It is really flying without wings! Points are awarded for distance and style. Japan and Finland are good at this event. So are Norwegians and Germans.

The Biathlon is a race where the competitors ski various distances and shoot at targets in both lying and standing positions. The targets are always five and variants of the race include going a penalty round of a track for every shot missed or another where you can load your gun and hit the target as you lose valuable seconds to your opponents. Many of the freestyle skiing events have funny names: Moguls, Aerials, Half-pipe. The competitors look like children having fun on ice but they are all fully fledged professionals who devote all their time to the sport. All these events have world tours where points attained from each competition are tallied to crown the overall winner of the season – just like in Formula 1 racing.

Many of these events are held in sub-zero temperatures which means even the spectators must be well clad. But it is still a festival down there especially in the events where the spectators gather at one place to see the finish. You see them even as they fight the cold in their winter dresses, the cold breath visible from their mouths, still waving their country’s flags or special banners bearing the names of their favourite stars. And then there is the shout as the ski-jumpers fly high in the air, their bodies parallel to their gigantic skis as they concentrate to land on their skis in the landing area.

It may be necessary to explain the difference between skiing and skating. What the long distance skiers do on long skis is skiing. What ice-hockey players do is skating. Both require a lot of practice from childhood to become very good at. Apart from ice hockey, there are other sports based on skating. There is speed skating with the competitors in aerodynamic dresses going at top speed in both indoor and outdoor tracks. Then there is figure skating where the competitors dance on ice to music making different heart-breaking moves having special names: toe loop, salchow, axel, loop, etc. It is a matter more of aesthetics and technique than of sporting endurance. And it does not hurt one bit that the girls are skimpily dressed and when their male partners throw them in the air, they can spread their legs wide... The Russians are the best in this sport but the Japanese, Chinese, Canadians and Americans are good too. We still remember the story of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan in the lead up to the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway. Both Figure and Speed skating are controlled by the International Skating Union (ISU), founded 1892, with headquarters in Lausanne, the city that is home to the Olympic Museum. Oh no, Ghana is not a member of ISU. But South Africa is. And even United Arab Emirates too…

There is another ice sport called Bandy. It looks like ice hockey but is played outdoors on a rink the size of a football pitch. The ball is small, round and hollow. I never heard of Bandy until I came to Europe but it has been played since the beginning of the last century. It has its World Cup too. The best nations are Russia, Sweden, Finland, and Byelorussia. There is an outgrowth of Bandy called Floor ball which is played indoors on a basketball type floor rather than on ice. This relatively new game is now a fully-fledged sport with its World Cup for men and women. The best nation is Sweden which has won all the world cups so far for. But Finland and Switzerland are good too. Since floor ball has nothing to do with snow or ice and is cheap to play, it could be played in Ghana too. But it still depends on a long tradition of snow and ice games which we do not have.

And, oh, I will not even talk of the Bobsleigh event that can reach speeds greater than the Downhill and in which Jamaica made a name by presenting a team for the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Cool Runnings…

All these games have their stars who are huge celebrities. In Canada where ice hockey is the national sport, The Great One, Wayne Gretzky, is regarded with divine reverence. Ever heard of Alberto Tomba? He is a former Alpine skier who is still a celebrity in his native Italy. Lindsey Vonn is a well-known US alpine skier who had a relationship with Tiger Woods.

A most noticeable thing in snow and iced based sports is the absence of black persons. The only Africans we see are the ones born and bred in Europe or USA by African parents. Blacks generally do not take to snow sports. There are not many black professional ice hockey players in the USA and Canada, countries that have large black populations. I leave it to our American readers to tell us why. There have been only a few black figure skaters. Of the lot, Surya Bonaly of France is clearly the most famous. She won the European and World titles several times but missed out on an Olympic gold. In her final Olympic appearance in 1998, she did the famous backflip on ice even though it was not allowed. The NHL is richer than the richest European Soccer leagues. But since Africans do not play ice hockey, they cannot flock there the way they do to the European football league.

As countries, cities or ski resorts struggle to be hosts of the Soccer World Cup, and the two Olympics, there will be no entries coming from Africa for the Winter Olympics. I do not know if even South Africa has enough snow to host those games. The Winter Olympics itself remains a predominantly white thing.

And, soon, the winter will be gone. The snow will cease to fall. The winter stadia will be locked up. But the snow will come again next season. The skis will be dusted off and the winter resorts will be manned again. But in Africa, we will become none the wiser for all these as we continue playing football, and football, alone. Thank goodness, no snow will drive us away from the football pitches.


Kofi Amenyo (kofi.amenyo@yahoo.com)