Rings Over Dakar While Senegal Drowns in Debt

The Olympic rings went up in Dakar on Saturday, painted over what used to be Christmas lights, while Senegal negotiates with creditors and the International Monetary Fund over billions of dollars in previously undisclosed debt. Repeated credit downgrades have followed. The Youth Olympic Games opened anyway, with nearly 2,700 teenagers aged 14 to 17 competing across 25 sports and 153 medal events.

Who Has the Power

The men and women running this show don't sweat in the sand. IOC President Kirsty Coventry, a former Zimbabwean swimmer who now leads the committee, told a summit Saturday that the Games are "showing the world our capacity (as Africa), a capacity that sometimes is underestimated." She said the opening ceremony will be televised live in more than 30 countries. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye said the Games will celebrate "our collective capacity to transform sport into an economic and social engine," and noted that 130 years of Olympic history passed before the flame ever landed on African soil.

The Games were supposed to happen in 2022. Then came COVID-19, and Senegal's then-president, Macky Sall, asked for more time to prepare. The Olympics waited four years. Prime Minister Ahmadou Al Aminou Lo called it "a symbol."

The committee also hands out the flags. With the IOC effectively lifting the Russian Olympic Committee's suspension in July, about three months ago, Russian athletes compete under their own flag and colours for the first time at an Olympic event since the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, now in its fifth year of conflict. The ROC says 13 Russian athletes and 10 coaches are going to Senegal. Ukraine's public broadcaster refused to show the ceremonies. Whether a teenager gets to compete still depends on each sport's international federation, a chain of permission that runs entirely above the athletes' heads.

Who Gets Crushed

The base article admits what the banners don't say. The Games have "struggled to stoke wild enthusiasm across Senegal." Many people are more concerned with the high cost of living, unemployment and economic hardship. Dakar "can feel half built, its concrete exposed, its roads unfinished." Empty water bottles painted in the colours of visiting nations line the roads toward refurbished venues. That's the budget version of a spectacle: paint the trash and call it pageantry.

Coventry said a country doesn't have to be wealthy to host, and that the movement needs to make the Games less complex and more affordable by using existing venues. She also said young people want "genuine and authentic engagement," not just the appearance of being heard. The people who actually have to live next to the building sites weren't quoted saying anything about that.

What People Actually Did

Strip away the ceremony and the ground-level picture is simple. Senegalese people already organise their own sport without anyone's permission slip. Football fans and young people set up impromptu matches in the evenings or on weekends on the beach or in village squares. As the day cools, hundreds of people flock to the Corniche to run, do strength training or take part in group exercise. Some 6,000 Senegalese volunteers are helping put on the event, unpaid labour holding up the apparatus. Of 136 Senegalese athletes competing, the traditional wrestling and surf scenes that made the country's sports culture were born in the street and on the shore, not in a boardroom in Lausanne.

Six refugee athletes based in Africa compete under a flag of their own, a flag handed to people who have no state willing to carry them.

The Calendar of Prestige

The committee's eyes are already on the next prize. South Africa is officially in the running for the 2036 Summer Olympics and could become the first African nation to host the full Games. The IOC calls Dakar "an important milestone" and a chance to showcase Senegal's cultural richness. The teenagers get the sand and the sweat. The institution gets the milestone.