Even though the Paris Olympics ended last year, it feels like only yesterday.
For almost the entirety of the 17-day Games, there were unrelentingly poor performances given by Egypt, one after the other. The daily news bulletin sounded like Groundhog Day: “Egypt’s so-and-so athlete finished ninth out of 10, so-and-so finished 19th out of 20, so-and-so finished 62nd out of 64.” One bad day followed another bad day.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Unacceptable. Uninspiring. Disappointing. Pick any adjective and you would be right.
On the rare occasions that so-and-so reached the quarter-finals or semis, the hopes of a medal were not just dashed but, in some cases, blown to smithereens. The most glaring example was Morocco’s humiliation of Egypt 6-0 in the men’s football bronze medal game.
Soon after the Olympics, Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi called for a complete overhaul of the country’s Olympics system following our abysmal performance in Paris. With the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics slowly beginning to appear over the horizon, it would be a good idea to remind ourselves what Al-Sisi’s directives were to avoid a Paris repeat.
The written presidential statement included a complete evaluation of sports federations that participated in the Paris 2024 Olympics. It called for a review of the expenditure of funds allocated to sports federations based on their performance in Paris and an assessment of the amounts given to individual federations relative to their results.
The statement said it will support federations that unexpectedly achieve high rankings to improve their performance in future tournaments.
Al-Sisi also ordered a reduction in participation in sports where Egypt lacks a competitive edge, limiting it to only promising athletes.
A new system for selecting athletes will be established, comparing local and Olympic achievements. The number of technical and administrative staff participating in Olympic delegations will also be reduced.
The president’s instructions could not have surprised anyone who witnessed or was a part of that dreadful showing in Paris. Egypt finished with just three medals: gold in the modern pentathlon, silver in weightlifting and a bronze in fencing.
1-1-1.
Easy to remember.
Never to be forgotten.
Because we expected to do better.
Shortly before the Paris Olympics began, Egypt’s minister of youth and sports predicted that Egypt would collect from six to 10 medals, probably basing his forecast on the Tokyo Olympics three years earlier when Egypt took home six medals — a gold, a silver and four bronze — for the country’s biggest haul at one Games.
We never reached those heights in Paris. In fact, we only got half of the minimum number the minister expected.
Rushing to Egypt’s defence, albeit a small contingent, garnering three medals in Paris, including a gold, was said to be commendable considering Egypt’s modest Olympics history. It had collected only 41 medals in the 24 Olympics it has participated in. In Paris alone, the US, which topped the table, won 126 medals.
The proponents added that in Paris, Egypt finished in 52nd place out of 206 countries. Only 91 countries won medals and Egypt was one of them.
But to those who preferred not to come down on Egypt’s athletes too hard, we say not so fast. You can count on one hand how many medals we won — if your hand had two broken fingers. Egypt should have done better in Paris. Its Olympic trajectory says so: five medals were won in Athens, two in Beijing, four in London, three in Rio, and six in Tokyo.
An awful amount of money, by Egypt’s standards, was also splashed out. Reportedly LE1.7 billion ($35.3 million) following the Tokyo Olympics went to training, equipment, many foreign coaches, and other resources necessary for the build-up.
For a country whose vast majority must struggle with the daily headache of putting food on the table, that’s a lot of food.
To Paris, we also sent our biggest Olympic contingent to date: 164 athletes, the biggest in Africa and the Arab world.
But apparently bigger is not always better. In our more successful Olympics, in Tokyo, we sent only 132 athletes.
Statistics tell the tale: In Paris, the US, as an example, sent 592 athletes who medalled in 34 sports but came up empty-handed in 10 sports. That’s 77.2 per cent efficiency.
In Paris, meanwhile, Egypt medalled in three sports and received nothing for their troubles in 19 sports. That’s 13.6 per cent efficiency.
If comparing to a sports powerhouse like the US makes it look like we’re comparing oranges with skyscrapers, let’s bring it down a notch. Try oranges versus tangerines.
Algeria and newcomer Bahrain collected two gold each while Kenya, with four gold and 11 altogether, was in an entirely different class, one of four African countries which bested Egypt. Actually, Kenya didn’t send half as many athletes as we did — 81 in total — but performed the best from Africa.
Shortly after the Paris Olympics, this writer questioned why every Egyptian who has qualified to enter an Olympics should actually go. We stick with our unsolicited advice: the Olympics are not for everybody.
There must be a sense of where our athletes stand in the world, not just in Africa where we qualify from.
How to do that? An athlete and his or her federation need only look at personal bests, then compare with the best other athletes in the world, not just one continent.
The two biggest individual sports are track and field and swimming. Both are measured in seconds and centimetres. It’s black and white mathematics; no room for grey. No need for analytics or the Pythagorean Theorem.
Are the figures close enough to win a medal or is the difference as far from here to Neptune?
You don’t have to be as close as Noah Lyles was when he won the 100 metres by 5,000th of a second.
But the gap cannot be so big that you could drive a truck right through it.
The fly in the ointment is that it would sound disingenuous to tell athletes that even though they qualified for an Olympics, they won’t be going because they’re not that good, that qualifying from Africa is not good enough. We understand. It’s not the nicest thing to do. It seems so unjust after all the sweat and toil the athletes have put in.
To prevent contentiousness, the rules should be made clear before qualifiers begin. So, if you’re first in Africa in the 100 metres but 30th in the world, you still might not go to the Olympics even though you can.
Best to rest. Thanks, but no thanks.
We should not send every wannabe to the Olympics just because they qualified from the African zone. No matter how hard they trained, being the best in Africa should not mean a free pass to the Olympics; there are other continents to worry about. This is the Olympic Games, the elite of all tournaments and where only the best survive.
In the Olympics, competition is much higher, so the bar has to be raised higher. Right now, the bar is on the floor. Not following the qualification rules just stated led in Paris to matchups looking like a varsity team against a JV squad.
Most individual sports are measurable. But sports that have judges, who use a prescribed system of points, like diving and gymnastics (Egypt lost in both) are subjective — maybe you do well, maybe you don’t. But all the same, to see whether you have a chance, the same qualification rule applies: are we close enough to overcome a judge’s vagaries or are we simply out of our depth, regardless?
Not every sport is measured by a ruler or a stopwatch. Team sports are more intangible and a much iffier proposition.
Some, for example, will argue that when you qualify for a World Cup, you definitely go to it, so why not go if you’ve made it to an Olympics? You can try, but beware that in the three team sports Egypt participated in Paris, the result was more of the same: no medals.
And let us not be fooled by the almost daily headlines about our athletes, especially juniors, winning or doing well in tournaments nobody ever heard of. “Success” in these minor championships prove nothing. And as any parent of a preteen will tell you, the jump from amateur to professional does not always pan out.
Faith also came up in the Paris Games. There is no limit to what strong convictions can achieve. However, you cannot expect to be off a world swimming or track record by a mile, yet expect on the day of competition to miraculously make up for the deficit. Sure, maybe some catch lightning in a bottle but the chances of that happening are highly improbable.
If we do not establish stricter criteria for selecting athletes to future Olympics, we will remain stuck on the three lonely medals we received in Paris, maybe even less.
Along the way to those three medals, mishaps and misery abounded.
Egypt’s first ever female boxer to qualify for the Olympics exited the Paris Games without throwing a punch when she failed to make her weight division.
On the eve of her first match Yomna Ayad weighed in at 54kg when measured by boxing officials. The next day when she was weighed again just before the bout, she had become 0.7kg over the limit. As a result, she was disqualified.
Egypt’s boxing federation said Ayad’s weight gain was attributed to “common physiological changes”.
Some people did not buy the federation’s explanation that Ayad’s cells suddenly morphed on the night of a full moon. They preferred instead to air withering criticism on mainstream and social media, accusing the federation of negligence and not monitoring and following up with their athletes, especially women.
How Ayad gained 700 grams from sunset to sunrise remains for many an ongoing mystery. There is a lot of guessing over what she had for dinner, and whether she might have had it behind closed doors.
Then there was Egyptian fencer Nada Hafez who revealed that she was playing while seven months pregnant.
The stunning admission made by Hafez, who was eliminated from the round of 16 in the women’s sabre individual event, raised many questions as to whether Egyptian officials knew about her bulge in the first place. As far as is known, the Egyptian Fencing Federation never said Hafez was pregnant and the public did not know it until she said so.
If officials were unaware of her condition, it must be asked how a seven-month pregnancy went unnoticed. And just as bad, she probably could not give a top-notch performance, physically or mentally.
And if they knew about the pregnancy, wouldn’t they and Hafez be taking a big risk? Fencing is all about thrusts and parries, actions that could easily lead to a miscarriage.
On to the next calamity, Egypt’s Farida Osman, one of Africa’s most decorated swimmers, never even made it to Paris because her coach did not know the rules of participation. Osman had been told by the Egyptian Swimming Federation that she would be participating in the Paris Olympics based on a nomination from the federation.
She was even invited to an event at the Embassy of France in Cairo, held to celebrate Egyptian athletes who qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
But Osman was denied a spot due to limitations in the Universality Programme, which the Egyptian Olympic Committee failed to navigate correctly.
How embarrassing it must have been that despite receiving confirmation from Egyptian officials, Osman was later informed that she could not participate through the Universality Programme.
The rules, it seems, had been misinterpreted or misunderstood or misread by the Egyptian Olympic Committee whose boss, unbelievably, was also the head of Egypt’s swimming federation. That the head of these two bodies was caught unaware of the rules of eligibility was an egregious mistake standing somewhere between gross negligence and extreme incompetence.
We needed to do better in Paris. There was no need to have looked like bystanders so much of the time, taking in the sights.
The honour of representing your country in an Olympics is Part I. Part II is winning something once you get there.
After the Paris Olympics, Al-Sisi congratulated the Egyptian athletes who made it to the podium: Ahmed Al-Gendi, Sara Samir, and Mohamed Al-Sayed. He hailed their accomplishments as “a source of pride for our beloved nation”.
Surely, though, the president would have been happier, as would have the entire nation, had we won more shiny objects.
Can anyone fix this problem? Anyone?
Egypt’s underwhelming performance is what generated Al-Sisi’s pronouncements which in essence called for a detailed review in order to improve sports in the country and have Egypt’s athletes do better in Los Angeles while ensuring transparency and accountability.
The clock is ticking. Less than three years are left before LA which, by the way, is not long for Olympic athletes.
This month marks one year since Al-Sisi’s guidelines were issued. In them, he put his foot down. The president put federations across Egypt on notice. In Paris, they did a good job to show how bad they were. Were they publicly acting like all was OK or did they actually think all was OK?
Al-Sisi made it clear. For LA 2028, Egypt better get its act together. The debacle of what went down in Paris will not be tolerated.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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