Sprinter Merlene Ottey, one of the great Olympians in history, recently switched countries. Ottey ran for her native Jamaica in six Olympics, from 1980 through 2000, and won eight medals, three silvers and five bronzes, including a silver in the 4-by-100-meter relay in 2000. Now 44 but still competitive, she'll run for Slovenia, where her coach is based and where she has lived since 1998.
"Slovenia is the right place for me," Ottey told the British newspaper the Independent. "There was a big fuss in 2000 because people said I was too old. I thought, fine, if I'm too old, I'll find another country where I'm appreciated."
Nigerian Francis Obikwelu, front, runs for Portugal.
(AP)
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Some Olympians switch countries for political reasons. Sofia Sakorafa, who threw the javelin for Greece in the 1980 Olympics, is coming out of retirement this year to make a political statement. Now a city councilor in the Greek town of Maroussi, Sakorafa will throw the javelin on the Palestinian team.
"My goal is to compete for the Palestinians and for peace," she told reporters this summer. "That's all. And that's what I want to convey to the world, not the competitive aspect. . . . I'm sure everyone realizes a 47-year old woman who hasn't competed for 17 years doesn't have any ambitions of setting records or winning medals."
Unlike Sakorafa, most Olympian country-jumpers simply want to play. Anna Kozlova, a synchronized swimmer who competed on the post-Soviet Unified Team in Barcelona in 1992, moved to the United States in 1993 because she was fascinated by the country she saw portrayed in American movies. Forced to sit out the 1996 Olympics because of the three-year rule, she swam for the U.S. team in 2000 and is back again this year.
"Swimming for a new country was a little strange at first," she says, "but with Russia, so many people left for different countries and different teams that it was pretty normal."
A Migratory Tradition
"This is not a new thing," says Kevin Wamsley, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies in Ontario. "The issue of athlete migration has been with us for quite some time."
Ever since the modern Olympics began in 1896, Wamsley says, athletes have competed for countries other than their own. In 1904, for instance, the games were held in St. Louis -- a long, grueling trip from Europe in those days -- so few Europeans competed. Their places were sometimes filled by Americans with ethnic connections to those countries.
"The early lack of organization," Wamsley says, "permitted a rather loose category of nationalism."
Although the modern Olympics were organized on the principle that athletes compete for their country, Wamsley says, nationality was not as important in the early decades as it became during the Cold War, when the games became an athletic battleground between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.
"The Cold War was a period of heightened nationalism," Wamsley says. "Now, in a period of globalization, you see a greater international traffic in athletes, both Olympic and professional."
Over the past hundred years, at least a dozen athletes have represented two different countries in different Olympic Games, according to records supplied by the International Olympic Committee. Scores of other athletic immigrants have competed representing a nation other than the one in which they were born. Of the 531 members of this year's U.S. Olympic team, for example, 30 were born in foreign countries -- 20 nations in all.
Country-switching is now so common that it is usually noticed only when one of the switchers achieves infamy by a particularly flamboyant screw-up.
In 1984, for example, South African runner Zola Budd finagled her way around the apartheid-era boycott of her native land by competing for Britain, birthplace of her grandfather. Running barefoot in the 3,000-meter race, Budd collided with America's golden girl Mary Decker, who fell to the ground. Neither woman won a medal. In 1992, when the boycott ended, Budd ran for South Africa in Barcelona, but again failed to win a medal.
