Eel Cooled Over Olympic Selection
The Age
Friday August 6, 2004
For the past month, Eric "the Eel" Moussambani has sat idle in his home town of Malabo, waiting for a phone call.
Summoned back to Equatorial Guinea from his Spanish training base, supposedly to collect his Athens accreditation, the iconic African swimmer has recently learned that an application glitch may derail his dream of competing in Greece. And eight days from the opening ceremony, Moussambani has all but given up hope. The 26-year-old said the Equatorial Guinea Olympic Committee had not submitted his accreditation for Athens because it was unable to locate his passport photo. To most, such a scenario would seem absurd. But Moussambani has learned to accept this kind of official explanation, the same kind that has, thus far, stopped him from accepting a university scholarship in Wisconsin and forced him to Valencia, Spain, in order to continue training. "I have been training very hard for three years . . . and my goal was wanting to go to Athens and to show the people I can do better and I can do something," Moussambani told The Age last night from Malabo. "I will know this time tomorrow. Our team leaves the next day. But I am almost gone, I think." Though Moussambani's memories of his flailing, gasping 100-metre swim at Sydney remain vivid, the international notoriety that followed his career appears to be fading rapidly. Gone are the sponsorship deals, the autograph-signing tours of Europe and the worldwide media attention. Despite cutting his 100 metres personal-best time from 1 minute 52.72 seconds in Sydney to less than 57 seconds, a near-broke Moussambani fears that failure to compete in Athens will force him into retirement. "I don't have any more sponsors. I have been training very hard but nobody has been helping me (financially). I have a plan to go to Athens but if I can't go, there is not enough money (to continue)," he said.FINA officials contacted by The Age last night said Moussambani still has an opportunity to compete in Athens, but only if his national Olympic committee takes up his cause. In 2000, Moussambani was invited to compete in Sydney through a program that allowed a handful of athletes to compete at the Olympics even if they did not meet qualifying standards.
© 2004 The Age