Former Ghanaian athlete, Ebenezer Oko Addy
Former Ghanaian athlete, Ebenezer Oko Addy has made some shocking revelations about his time as an athlete.
According to Mr Oko Addy, athletes that won medals at the 1966 Commonwealth in Kingston, Jamaica were never rewarded for their efforts.
Oko Addy was one of Ghana’s athletes in the Men’s 4×100 relay team that won gold at the event. Ghana excelled at the Games, winning 9 medals, 5 of which were gold.
Fifty-five years after their exploits in Jamaica, Mr. Oko Addy recalls that their efforts at the games were never rewarded due to the military uprising which toppled Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s government.
Ghana’s contingents went to the games with Nkrumah as president but returned home to the news that a new president, Joseph Arthur Ankrah, an Army General had overthrown Nkrumah’s government.
A situation that scuttled the otherwise well-intended plans for the contingents.
“In 1966, there was a coup so General Ankrah invited us to the Castle, you know Ghana, they gave us some Coca-Cola and some meat pie,” Mr. Oko Addy said exclusively on GhanaWeb’s Sports Check show.
He added, “We never got a penny for doing all that. We never got a brass farthing.”
According to Oko Addy, representing Ghana at any tournament in the 1960s was described as a service to the state as it never came with any monetary reward.
The 1964 Olympian stated, “It is what you call a pro-Patria for the fatherland,” adding, “In those days it was strictly armature, so people were not paid to do the Olympics. They changed the rules recently.”
Having lived a fulfilled life, the 80-year-old intimated that, “you can always look back and say, things could have been done different because in our time nobody got paid but it was okay.”
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